Dahlia Daze

Dahlias represent none of the political correctness found in current gardening circles – quite the opposite.  They take a lot of time and care to grow, being nowhere near low-maintenance.  Many types provide nothing useful to pollinators, and they aren’t native to North America.  They don’t thrive just anywhere, take a long time to start flowering, and look like a train wreck after the first hard frost.  But I still like them.  Here’s how I grow them, and why.

After a few nights of freezing temperatures, last Saturday represented one of the bigger moments in the dahlia-growing year.  Blackened, drooping, and soggy, the shoots were chopped down to stubs and the debris hauled off to the compost pile.  Then careful probing and coaxing with a digging fork revealed the tubers, in all their lumpy, bumpy glory.  Shaking off the excess soil, I carefully moved them to the relative warmth of the basement, let them rest for a day, then bagged them with handfuls of cedar shavings for their winter rest, all the time taking care not to lose the labels.  When I start to reverse this process in May, I hope the tubers won’t be mushy, or shriveled, or chewed upon.  With any luck and some skill, dahlias can keep-on keeping-on for years, perhaps decades, but time in storage is the riskiest part of their lifecycle.

Spring finds me searching longingly for the eyes of the dahlias.  The dormant tubers can be divided, but each must have an “eye” (or bud) to produce a shoot, and these can be elusive, as the dormant tubers look as likely to grow as an old shoe.  I tend to leave several tubers together in a clump, rather than separate them into singles, to increase the chances at least a couple of buds will appear.  Planted a few inches deep, a few feet apart, I give each clump a stake, a tomato cage, a handful of fertilizer and a label.  The buds develop into green shoots nonchalantly at first, in no hurry, but magical nonetheless.  June and July come and go, and on into August, with just leaves and shoots, but finally, flower buds appear.  Late August, September and October are the dahlia paydays, with dazzling flowers produced in abundance, if deer, hurricanes, or other inconvenient spoilers can be kept at bay. 

I meet old friends when my dahlias bloom.  Most of my varieties produce the huge “dinner-plate” type of blooms, 7 or more inches across, so they are big friends, too.  ‘Einstein’ is a smart dark purple, while ‘Zorro’ is a deep red with sharply pointed petals.  ‘Harvest Moonlight’ produces pale yellow orbs, ‘El Sol” blends yellow and orange into a range of fiery shades and ‘Bodacious’ is a bawdy red with yellow on the edges and bottom of each petal, looking like tongues of fire.  Dahlias are the sugary sweets of the garden, intoxicating and addicting.  Eye candy indeed.  No other flower is quite as spectacular, so fulfilling their demands is worth the effort.