Dahlia Daze

Gardening is a delicious addiction, as every gardener knows. The hobby seduces the senses one by one: the sight of colorful blooms, the sound of wind, water, and wildlife, the feel of sun-warmed earth, the taste of garden grown fruits and vegetables, the heavenly fragrance of it all.

Become hooked and the craving for new gardening challenges grows. Some go the way of the water garden, while others pursue the perfect lawn, but perhaps the most common love affair for gardeners is with a particular perennial plant that has piqued their passion. You probably know one on your street or in your neighborhood: the rose devotee, the hosta zealot, the iris buff, or the daylily fanatic. Orchids, it should be noted, are one of the most dangerous plants on the planet; they consume people.

There is one plant, however, that seems somehow to illicit unrivalled allegiance from its advocates: the dahlia. Catch a glimpse of just one in bloom, and you’ll swing open a stranger’s gate to get a closer look. View the intoxicating scene of hundreds in bloom, and heaven help you.

Two Pony Gardens in Long Lake, one of the Twin Cities’ few purveyors of dahlia varieties. “I didn’t think dahlias were anything special until I started adding more and more to my garden, and saw what happens when you have beds full of them. That’s when I fell in love.”

Ringer had spent “quite a while” in the landscaping industry, and was looking for a market-niche–type plant to grow. “I was burning out from creating gardens for other people, and then maintaining them. I tried growing and selling medicinal herbs, but the market for them wasn’t there,” she says. Alert to the fact that dahlias were a specialty plant not readily available to northern gardeners, she evicted the herbs from her greenhouse and began dancing with dahlias.

The market soon followed, for as she astutely points out, “It’s always hard for northern gardeners to grow big, beautiful, back-of-the-border flowers that are going to get up into the four- to six-foot-tall range, but then there’re dahlias, which have these amazing, eight- to twelve-inch blooms. They are terrific for cutting. Plus they are a true specialty plant—you need to acquire a pretty fair level of expertise to grow them.”

Specialty plant indeed—the dahlia is one of those plants, like the rhododendron, that should come with a black-on-yellow tag that reads, “WARNING: Growing This Thing Involves Gardening.”

“I call dahlias the poodle of the flower world—dahlias have to be groomed and attended to on a weekly basis. For some dahlia lovers, daily would be more like it!,” says Ringer. Dahlia stems are brittle, and plants can blow over and snap easily in the wind— the reason dahlia aficionados stake each plant. Disbudding is another trick of the dahlia trade. To grow proper dahlias, one needs to break off certain buds as they form in summer so that the plant will devote its energy to a chosen few.  This creates larger flowers and a plant that is well-proportioned without becoming too top-heavy.