Gladiolus pardalinus

Gladiolus pardalinus is a cormous perennial that reaches heights in bloom between 35 cm and 55 cm. The corm is ovoid to conic, covered in a tunic of cartilaginous layers and about 2 cm in diameter.

The plant produces three or four leaves sheathing and enveloping the stem. The lowest leaf becomes the longest but only a quarter of stem length. The other leaves are spaced up the stem. The linear blades are hairless, about 5 mm wide.

The flowers look somewhat like birds or insects in flight. The plant is, however, sometimes called the tattooed lady or the leopard due to the dark red markings on the pale yellow of the tepals.

The species is distributed in only a small area in Mpumalanga and Limpopo, from Stoffberg to Modimolle.

The habitat is bushveld on dolerite outcrops. Although the plant is rare, its population in nature is stable, not considered threatened early in the twenty first century.

The species has become differentiated from G. woodii (Goldblatt and Manning, 1998; iNaturalist; www.safricanbulbs.org.za; http://redlist.sanbi.org).