Dahlias

Before the next big storm or the first strong frost ends their season, I would like to sing a song for the dahlias.  At the farm they are the foremost of the focal flowers.  I think the farmer pays more attention – planning, planting, tending, pondering – to them than any of the other gems of her garden.  Next year’s dahlias are a perennial hot stove league topic for Cheryl and the farmer.  When I hear “look at you, girlfriend!” or some such exclamation from the next room, it is probably the farmer ogling a dahlia in a catalog or on the internet.

Almost all of 1,000+ varieties of dahlia are many, many petaled.  My days of playing “she loves me; she loves me not” are behind me (for more than half my life now I have known who loves me, and how) but if I was still in that dreadful game and looking for an option that would extend the uncertainty, a dahlia would be a better option than a daisy, although one would have to be very distracted to be willing to do that kind of violence to a dahlia. 

The internet is packed with dahlia information, much of it provided by enterprises that want to sell you bulbs, but a lot by true-lovers of the flower.  Both ways, there is an understandable urge to over-glorify its history: to pass along the story that it was high-esteemed by the Aztecs for medicine, food and aesthetic pleasure; the story that it quickly took the old world by storm despite Empress Josephine’s attempts to keep it to herself; the story that as a food source the tubers helped keep the French peasantry alive during the revolution, etc.  As a tour guide I learned that some stories are too satisfying to tell and too pleasing to hear to risk fact checking them.  So it goes with many dahlia stories, unfortunately, although the truth – or our best conjectures about it (explained here, here, and here) – can be a rewarding consolation.

There is a rich vocabulary of dahlia descriptors.  Here are some of the terms used to describe their various petals: blunt, involute, revolute, flat ray, disk florets, quilled, indented.  I say the petals of the pompon dahlias are shaped like fairy hot tubs (or maybe vice versa).  When you cultivate a new variety of dahlia, you get to name it.  The results range from the fanciful to the ostentatious to the perplexing.  The farmer’s favorite dahlia of this past summer – a type of Swan dahlia – is named “Bluetiful”.  There is a dahlia variety named “Franz Kafka”.  The names make it more interesting to overhear Cheryl and the farmer’s flower conversations. A snippet I heard recently: “Narrows Pam keeps putting out – she just won’t stop.”

The other day I found the farmer cutting away the older dahlia leaves, which had taken on a powdery cast similar to what I see on my pumpkin plants by mid-August.  Amongst the old growth there were many new, strong stems with buds ready to burst.  She talked of her plans for the later autumn: digging up some bulbs so the plants won’t be as crowded next summer; leaving the keepers in the ground instead of storing them in the basement as she did last winter; offering the excess to grateful folks on the local listserve; finding space in the garden for the new varieties she’ll be ordering soon.  There’s no end to her schemes.  It is a fair affliction – dahlias on the mind.

The Dahlia Row at Slippery Slope