Jeff Sandys was gently pulling each petal of a miniature dahlia and pasting it into a 10×10 grid. There’s a raffle and the winner who guessed the number of petals on this particular flower would win, “Oh, I don’t know, I think it’s 25 dollars,” Jeff said, waving his long hands. “Do you grow?”
Jeff is the president of the Pacific Northwest Dahlia Association. When I told him that I do grow, but I’m a terribly lazy gardener, he gave me some good advice.
“If you’re not going to dig them up, when they start to sprout in the spring, cut them back so it’s just one stem that gets all the energy. You’ll get a stronger plant that way.”
My dahlias, which bloomed late this year, are ramshackle things but still gorgeous. Two are in full flower, a neon yellow and a red and yellow that I think looks like fireworks. I don’t know what they’re called.
“Oh, yeah, there are patterns,” Jeff says, when I ask if he has a theory about the petals he’s counting. He draws a diagram on the edge of his counting sheet. “If you look at them, they spiral out to the right or to the left and they come in rows of 13 or 21. Fibonacci numbers. I built a computer program to draw dahlias. Are you interested in math?”
“Naw, I’m bad at math, I just hearing about people’s projects.”
About half the giant greenhouse at Sky Nursery had been turned over to dahlias. There was one table of complicated arrangements and another table with single flowers floating in water, but mostly, it was row after row of simply presented flowers — a single stem with a single bud in a black vase or tin can. There were giant dahlias as big as my head — really! — and little tiny delicate flowers and complicated color fades and petals with shredded edges and twisted edges and flat little rounded edges like a child might draw a flower. Ladies — it was mostly ladies, but there were some serious men too — strolled the aisles with clipboards noting the names of the varieties they might like to seek out to grow in their own gardens next season.
A large man with a large camera shot close-ups of the flowers.
“Ours didn’t win this year,” he said, “it was raining when we cut them, and that’s hard. But everyone’s dealing with the same conditions. Plus, we live up north, so it wasn’t as hot as you’ve had it down here… maybe next year, we’ll do better.” He pointed to the Best in Show winner, a giant globe of yellow on a raised pedestal. “He’s retired, but he’s been growing since he was a teenager. Nice guy.”
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The Pacific Northwest is premier growing territory for dahlias. There are two dozen or so clubs devoted to the fine art of cultivating them and there are a handful of regional dahlia gardens, too — one at Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill, one at the Bellevue Botanical Garden, and here’s a directory if you need to find dahlias near you.
I always love a good dahlia show.