Igor Adamovic

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Igor Adamovic, died of a massive heart attack on February 26, 2006.

Readers of North American Gladiolus Society's quarterly bulletin have known him for decades as a faithful, regular—and, we hear, opinionated—contributor, and for many years as Glad World’s official European correspondent from Slovakia. A 2001 International Gladiolus Hall of Fame inductee, he devoted the last third of this life to his vision of the improvement of the modern gladiolus—its floret substance and extreme ruffling and, more problematically, fragrance.

Igor was born on March 11, 1932, the first child of Dr. Stefan Adamovic, a Lutheran minister and high-school teacher and his wife, Vilma, also a teacher. From early childhood, Igor helped in the home gardens. Our grandfather was a founder of the Democratic Party of Slovakia, and received the Order of Labor for his direct participation in the Slovak national uprising against the Nazi occupation during World War II. He opposed the Stalinist seizure of power in 1948 and was persecuted as an anticommunist until his death in 1962.

At the time , it seem as though his persecution would effect Igor’s future career. In 1950, after he graduated from high school, the promoting committee would only recommend one course for him: music at the VSMU College of Fine Arts, as he was a gifted pianist. Despite this, he managed to undertake the study of architecture, as very few others had applied for such studies. After three years, Igor switched to the newly established school of economic engineering, from which he graduated in 1954. He then married Marta Kostialova, his first wife, with whom he had two children.

For the next fourteen years, he worked as a technical inspector of building investment, as a general investor of housing construction and then in the Ministry of Building Industry in Bratislava. In 1968, reform elements in the Communist Party, under the leadership of the first ever Slovak prime minister of Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubcek, instituted what was called Prague Spring. The so-called Soviet Union and its allies invaded and deposed Dubcek. Igor initiated a petition in support of Dubcek in the ministry, which was signed by nearly all of his colleagues; as a result, he was forced to leave the ministry.

During these years, his hobbies, beyond piano, had been driving and teaching sports flying. In 1967, he was given gladiolus cormels, and started growing them for the first time. We have discovered a beautifully written article in Slovak about his discovery of, and burgeoning love affair with, the gladiolus. (We are translating this for possible inclusion in a future GW. He would sometimes say, “After they kicked me out of the ministry, I found myself a hobby to which even the great Brezhnev could find no objections, because he could not say that there were communist and bourgeois flowers.”

He continued to work in building engineering for the next twenty years, then retied to devote himself fulltime to the breeding and selling of gladiolus. In 1975, he divorced and remarried; he had a third child in 1978. In the 1970s, he started growing—and breeding—ruffled American cultivars in earnest, then Cliff Buell’s fragrant cultivars, as well as G. murialae and Ms. Wright’s Lucky Star.

Igor formed the first gladiolus club in Slovakia in 1973. having published the first Slovak monograph on glads the year before. In 1973, he joined the NAGC and the British Gladiolus Society and, a year later, the South Australian Society. In 1983, he published his huge book, Gladioly-Meciky, cataloguing all known specimens, and illustrating both specimens and cultivars with color plates. (This book, written in Slovak, is still available via his website.) He introduced nearly five hundred cultivars, far more than any other European hybridizer in the last thirty years, numbers rivaling the also recently deceased Carl Fischer, who introduced cultivars over nearly sixty-five years!

Our father was most famous in North America for the beautiful cultivar, Bambino, which has been used as a parent by many breeders, both on your shores and in Central Europe. He always tried to internationalize his breeding, using Australian and New Zealand cultivars in his breeding program when few others did.

In late 1989, during the Velvet Revolution, Igor addressed students in public squares, campaigning proudly for the end of the Stalinist regime. In the years that followed, when Shirley Temple Black was U.S Ambassador to the then-Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, he send her a huge bouquet of his seedlings, asking her to pick one to be named after her, which she did. As a child, Igor, had been much taken with the then-child actress!

Igor Adamovic also came to love travel. He visited most European lands and, in 1977, won a gold medal in London with his seedling Miss Slovakia. He traveled further still, to the Canaries, to South Africa (and studied glad species there), to Mauritius and Thailand, to New Zealand and Tahiti. He never did visit the Americas, although the majority of his correspondence was with Americans and Canadians.

It is our hope that you will now see our late father as not only an amazing gladiolus hybridizer, but also as a great pianist, a good father, a Slovak patriot and lover of the poetry of its spoken language, whose interests spanned the globe. We will miss him terribly.

We hope that, by making crosses with his cultivars, you will help his legacy to live on in the world of the gladiolus that he so embraced.

(written by Igor Adamovic's children Danica&Jan)