Over 5 years of gardening in SW MI, Ive planted Gladiola from a wide variety of sources in varied locations in the garden, from shade to sun, wetter to drier, poorer soil to good, in ground near and far from walnut trees or in raised beds with non garden soil near/far from same. The first and second years almost all grew and flowered, with the only major difference being in size (height), seemingly related mostly to sun. The third and fourth years none thrived. Regardless of source, garden location, lifted/overwintered corms or new, every single plant that came up started slowly, was green until taking recognizable but stunted gladiola form about two feet tall, then became desiccated and uniformly brown and the buds either formed a withered attempt at a flower or nothing. The first time this happened I dug up and disposed of 100s of corms and assumed it was something as a new gardener that would become known to me over time since I could not locate anything online that would explain such a universal blight when so manny variable were involved. The fourth year I started with corms from many sources local and online and planted them as I’d done previously with the exception of including overwintered ones since I’d saved none. Same result as year 3. This year, still having found nothing to fix and justify a hope that planting them again would have a better result, I planted none. However, not having been able to confirm a disease was the culprit, I only dug up ones from garden beds where the corms were so numerous as to interfere with new plantings. The rest I decided to leave with the maybe misguided idea that they would become nutrients over time. This year in early June, a few and then increasingly many gladiola started to poke through. I pulled many, anticipating their sad dissipation, but many more escaped that fate long enough to appear to thrive. And they have - everywhere. Not a single one has gone the way of all of them in the prior two years. So, not only have they proven cold-hardy in my zone of 6b, which I didn’t expect, they somehow cast off whatever hex - I’m going to call it since that’s what it has begun to seem like to me - that befell them for two years. I only decided to abandon my passive wait and see what experience might reveal path when they strangely thrived this year. Suddenly the mystery became a lot more intriguing and worth engaging with since the outcome no longer seemed almost certainly to end with the blighted withering of something I rather favor everywhere I looked. However, I’ve still found no answer or even possible suggestions from the many master gardeners I know. Which is why I’ve finally resorted to submitting this. I apologize for the length but I wanted to include as many answers to questions about variables as possible since the universality of the changes seems especially inexplicable. To me at least. Any thoughts anyone can provide are extremely welcome to this novice gardener/verbose English major. Thanks