Will Nature make a man of me yet?

There is an image that anyone who came up on indie music carries somewhere in their head: Morrissey on stage with The Smiths, NHS spectacles and a hearing aid, swaying with armfuls of gladioli — stems jammed into the back pocket of his jeans, the rest flung out over the crowd until the boards were strewn with trampled blooms. Fans began bringing their own, and for a few years in the mid-1980s the gladiolus, of all flowers, was the emblem of a band better known for its melancholy.

What I find lovely about the choice is how unglamorous it is. The gladiolus is a tall, showy, slightly old-fashioned thing — a flower of municipal beds and funeral sprays and grandmothers' borders, not of rock and roll. That was rather the point. It carried a whole world of working-class, Northern English domesticity, and set against it the wilting, sword-like stems took on a tender, theatrical droop as they were thrown and crushed. The name comes from the Latin gladius, a sword; there is something fitting in a flower named for a weapon ending each night limp and romantic on a stage floor.

The gesture sits in an older tradition too. Morrissey was a devout admirer of Oscar Wilde, and the flower-as-statement — beauty offered up as a quiet act of defiance — belongs squarely to that aesthete lineage. It was a way of refusing the bleakness people projected onto the band: not plastic pop, not misery, but something grown, honest, and a little camp.

I think of it whenever I cut gladioli for the house. They are not subtle flowers, and they are all the better for it. If you want to grow your own, plant the corms in succession through spring for a long summer of spikes — and cut them when the lowest buds are just colouring, so they open slowly indoors. You can throw them about your kitchen if the mood takes you.