Horticulturally, a sport is a genetically variant growth. Although it is more common among extensively bred or genetically aberrative cultivars than simple species, the most basic of lily of the Nile can, on rare occasion, change floral color from blue to white or from white to blue, as I mentioned on the sixth of July. Unvariegated or ‘green’ sports are a more common annoyance among some cultivars with variegated foliage, such as popular cultivars of Euonymus japonica, since they grow faster with more chlorophyll, and can overwhelm the original and more desirable variegated growth. The yellow hybrid gladiola that I posted a picture of for Six on Saturday on the twenty-ninth of June could be a sport of an adjacent orange and yellow hybrid gladiola. I did not give it much consideration because I assumed it to be the first bloom that I noticed from one of a few bulbs that somehow survived for a few years longer than expected. Until last summer, the only hybrid gladiolas to survive from a mixed batch planted years earlier had been either purple or the aforementioned orange and yellow. However, now that the yellow bloom is gone, an equally unfamiliar orangish red bloom emerged from the same small colony of bulbs that had bloomed only orange and yellow. As their common name suggests, hybrid gladiolas are hybrids, so are innately genetically unpredictable, and therefore have potential to generate sports as they multiply. Although I do not know for certain that this new orangish red hybrid gladiola did not survive without blooming for the past few years, I sort of suspect that it and the new yellow hybrid gladiola are more recently developed sports of the original orange and yellow hybrid gladiola. I hope that both are as reliably perennial as the original.