Gladiolus aurantiacus

Gladiolus aurantiacus, commonly known as isihlanzi in Zulu, is a cormous perennial reaching from 45 cm to 75 cm in height. The flattish corm is irregularly shaped, about 3,5 cm in diameter.

The uppermost cataphylls are up to 8 cm tall and green. The four or five flowering stem leaves overlap, their blades usually shorter than their basal sheaths. Separate foliage leaves are grown next to the flowering stem from the same corm, five or six of them, usually near the end of flowering. They are narrowly lance-shaped, up to 60 cm long and 1 cm to 1,5 cm wide. 

The flowers have tiny orange speckles here on the background of a deeply yellow to pale orange corolla. An orange is called aurantium in Latin, the specific name of this plant aurantiacus referring to the flower colour. Streaking instead of speckling, red instead of orange, may also occur in the flower form. The perianth tube is about 6 cm in length. The inner tepals, similarly shaped to the outer three, i.e. broadly ovate and tapering to acute tips, are considerably smaller than the outer ones. The tepals may also be somewhat narrower than seen here. The oblong anthers grow on filaments shorter than the three stigma branches of the style. Flowering happens from spring to after midspring.

The species distribution is in KwaZulu-Natal, the south of Mpumalanga, possibly in Gauteng and the south of eSwatini (Swaziland).

The habitat is moist, stony grassland at high as well as low altitudes. The habitat population is deemed of least concern early in the twenty first century (Goldblatt and Manning, 1998; Pooley, 1998; iNaturalist; iSpot; JSTOR; www.biodiversityexplorer.org; http://redlist.sanbi.org).