1 day Ago By Lee Buttala
Last weekend, the Dewey Hall Dahlia Festival was the hot ticket in town, at least in the town of Sheffield. The event, in its second year, is an old-fashioned flower competition themed around one of our favorite fall and summer blooming tubers – the dahlia. The event was popular in its first year, as gardeners from around the region brought in the flowers they had grown and felt were the most prize-worthy, but in its second year it demonstrated something more—the power of flowers to cast a spell on a wide array of people who are captivated by nothing more than the sheer beauty and range of the varieties of flowers within the genus of Dahlia .
As people entered Dewey Hall, they were immediately taken in by the rows of tables housing collarette and water lily varieties, dinner-plate sized dahlias and spikily petalled cactus varieties in a range of hues that called to mind the Wizard of Oz. Some of the varieties were time-honored forms that have been around since the dahlia was brought into American gardens from the mountains of Mexico from which it originates (this also explains why they flower so well in the autumn weather of the Berkshires as the nights cool and help the plants to set more buds). Others were named for figures that gave a sense of the time that they were selected, such as Thomas Edison, a beautiful purple dinner plate form that has been passed along as tubers from gardener to gardener almost since the advent of the light bulb.
It was exciting to see these classics in the mix, but the event was further energized by new varieties offered by breeders and flowers created by home gardeners who grew their dahlias from seed. To preserve a dahlia from year to year, the tubers of the variety (at least in our zone) are dug out from the garden and stored in a cool dark place for the winter. This process works for those growing crosses and dahlias from seed as well.
If you grow a dahlia from seed and like its flowers, you can save it for the next season by digging up its tuber after it goes dormant. And given that the plant is genetically unique and not a clone of an old variety, you as the grower can name the variety. A friend of ours from Vancouver, Terri Clark, grew one she loved, is storing its tubers over the winter and can share her newly named variety, Oaxacan Sunset, with friends and fellow gardeners to add to their gardens in the years to come.
Seeds can be collected from dahlias if you bring flowers all the way to seed, but most people buy dahlia seed and grow out the plants to see what their flowers look like, holding on to the forms that they love for the next season. Storing dahlias is not hard. It is critical to wait before digging them until after the first hard frost when the foliage blackens.
Going into dormancy triggers the plants to set eyes on their tubers (not unlike those on potatoes) so that they can sprout in the coming year. The tubers are cut from the main stem and the middle section of the root mass is removed. The clumps should then be cleaned of some soil, allowed to dry slightly after cleaning, and stored at 35-40 degrees in a cool, dark space such as a root cellar or unheated basement.
Gardeners vary in how they store them. Some pot them up in containers and soilless mix so that they are ready to be started the next season; others mark them with their variety name—a sharpie works—and place them in a container with peat moss, soilless mix, or fine pine bark mulch. The goal is to keep them from dessicating too much over the winter while also making sure they do not have exposure to so much moisture that they rot.
The most exciting thing about overwintering them is that dahlias produce enough tubers from each plant to share with friends and other gardeners. And judging from the array of beautiful flowers at Dewey Hall, I need more friends and more dahlias. ____________________________________ A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others.
In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners..
