Dahlias: Prolific, forgiving and a riot of color

It sounded like a scene from a mystery.

I was eating Sunday dinner in Corvallis with my son Ben and some of his friends and mentioned I enjoy growing dahlias. The hostess, a woman named Jenny, said, “My neighbor had a prize dahlia in her front yard. It was beautiful and huge. And then one night, someone stole it, roots and all. She still wanders around the neighborhood, looking for it.”

People don’t steal rose bushes or irises or zinnias out of the ground. But dahlias? It’s no wonder the intruder just couldn’t resist.

I first grew dahlias at my daughter Amy’s suggestion. Wishing for more flowers that she could cut and arrange, she researched the subject and decided we needed dahlias. Soon after, our friend Rachel, who supplied florists with her vast crops, offered dahlia tubers for sale to her Facebook friends.

We chose five or six and planted them in the flower bed along the porch.

Not only did they grow into large, healthy plants with very little intervention from me, but the explosion of huge blooms, saturated with color, felt delightfully excessive, going completely above and beyond what I expected.

My Amish heritage taught me to be subdued, cautious, quiet and unobtrusive, always striving to be less instead of more. Dahlias, with their eye-popping blooms, rich colors and lavish production, seem an odd choice for someone like me.

I’ve noticed, however, that if you suppress your natural bent in one way, it pops out and compensates somewhere else, like rising bread dough popping the lid off a Tupperware bowl and bulging out the side. Dahlias feed the flamboyant side of my soul that didn’t fit the Amish mold and wouldn’t be shushed.

They do fit in well, though, with my Amish frugality, because one $5 potato-like tuber expands into dozens of bouquets and a whole wad of tubers to be given away or planted next year, leading to an astonishing multiplication in plants and blooms.

Not only are they prolific, but they’re also forgiving, a good combination for someone unsuited for the fuss and fiddling of roses and orchids. I’ve had outstanding results whether I fertilized or not, planted early or late, and deadheaded faithfully or sporadically.

The brown potato-like tuber, which can range in size from a small thumb to a large sweet potato at Winco, has no relation to the size of the flower, which might be a cute 1-inch filler flower or a dinnerplate dahlia. My Kasasagi, a one-inch gold-and-burgundy flower, grows from a tuber the size of a large Russet potato. Meanwhile, tubers for the 5-inch Peachy Princess are often only a couple of inches long.

“Peachy Princess” is a name I gave to a variety of beautiful dahlias in soft tones of orange with hints of yellow, before I realized that dahlia growers are as fanatical about names for the different breeds as other people are with varieties of dogs or horses. It mattered a lot. 

Unfortunately, I had long since tossed the labels and given them ones I found more appropriate — Burgundy Pride and White Knight and Pink Patricia, a lovely dinner plate from my friend Pat Lee.

Not only do my dahlias range in size from tiny to enormous, the colors rival the Benjamin Moore palette at Jerry’s Home Improvement, in tones from soft to saturated. Some petals are curled inward and some are flat; some form a tight hemisphere of precise spiraling petals, while others, such as “Hairy Potter,” look like an unbrushed head of hair. 

Grow them yourself

If you want to try growing dahlias yourself, buying tubers from friends is best, in my opinion, making you immediately part of the local dahlia growers’ inner circle. Other options include local nurseries or Swan Island Dahlias, the premier source in the Northwest.

You can plant indoors in pots as early as March, but wait until after the danger of frost to plant directly outdoors or to transplant from pots. Choose a well-drained, sunny spot. Dahlia plants are hardy, in my experience, but the biggest threat is soggy soil that might rot the tubers. My husband digs the holes for me, and he is more enthusiastic than necessary, making them about 8 inches deep, but they still grow just fine.

I like to throw a handful of bone meal and a few cups of water into the hole before I place the tuber inside and cover it. Each tuber should have an eye, an obscure little bump on one end that sprouts the green stalk, and it should face upward when the tuber is planted. I often have trouble locating it, and again, my plants forgive me generously and sprout anyhow.

The books say you shouldn’t water until the first green sprout shows, again to avoid rot. But I like to water a little bit now and then, just because I feel sorry for them.

After they’re up and growing, I water about twice a week, depending on the weather, and I prefer soaker hoses to sprinklers, but either work.

The biggest enemy of the blooms is little aphids that chew holes in the petals. While I would prefer not to use chemical insecticides, I haven’t found natural remedies that work as well.

Dahlias are late-summer bloomers and are often prolific into the fall. I invite my neighbors to come gather all they want, and it seems the more we all pick the flowers, the more they produce, a riot of abundance and color.

In the Willamette Valley, you can leave tubers in the ground over the winter, as they are unlikely to freeze. I like to dig them up, not only to keep them from rotting but to enjoy the multi-fold returns, as each tuber I planted turns into a whole gnarly wad, like a huge brown fist with a dozen twisted fingers.

I label them and store them in peat moss or wood shavings, and in spring I begin again. So far, no one has stolen my prize Diva or Purple Urple. If they did, I can’t say I’d blame them. But I hope they would have the courage to ask first, because I would be happy to share a dozen tubers from my overflowing supply. This club is all about generosity and abundance.