Dazzling Dahlias

I confess; I'm ditzy about dahlias. Several years ago I picked out three tubers at my local garden centre and planted them in my yard; now I have over a hundred of them! Once the three tubers I had planted bushed out and bloomed, I was hooked. I had to have more of them... and more... and more...

Dahlias are easy to love. Like sunflowers, they have that magical quality of rapid growth. To put a brown, lumpish tuber into the ground in May and see it turn into a five-foot-tall bushy, blooming plant by July is truly astonishing. And their blooms! Spectacular! Stupendous! Sensational! Superlatives were probably invented to describe them. I don't know of any other flower that produces such a prolific display of showy, brilliantly-colored blooms for months on end. And, just to make our relationship perfect, deer don't like them.

I know, I know, I'm practically raving. But if you live in deer-infested country like I do, seeing the huge, brightly-colored dahlias bloom in summer is like seeing the sun come out after four dreary months of rain.

Will dahlias be as rewarding in your garden? That depends. You have to have a sunny place to bed them, and lots of room, if you're going to grow the full-sized ones (which should be planted four to five feet apart). You have to be willing to water and feed them heavily; dahlias are hungry, thirsty plants. They'll need staking, as their hollow stems can't support the weight of their gigantic blooms. And you'll have to defend them from slugs (who love dahlia shoots) and earwigs (who love to infest their blooms). On top of all this, you'll have to spend time in the fall digging them up and storing the tubers over the winter, as dahlias are not the least bit frost hardy.

Still, every relationship involves work and commitment, and your dahlias will repay you a thousand-fold when you see them bloom. Speaking of blooms, one of the first decisions you'll have to make is what types of dahlias you want to grow. Today the Dahlia genus contains about 30 species and more than 20,000 cultivars, and are divided into 10 categories according to the Royal Horticultural Society's Index of Garden Plants. There are cactus-flowered dahlias with spiky tips, pompoms, which are perfectly ball-shaped, collarette dahlias, whose blooms look as if they have collars, and decorative dahlias, to name just a few types you can choose from. To see drawings of the different flower shapes, go to Dana Miller's article "Making Sense of Dahlias" at http://www.taunton.com/fg/features/plant... ; to see pictures of the different types of dahlias and explanations of the dahlia classifications, go to Dr. Michael Hickman's article "Growing Dahlias Successfully" at http://www.discoveredmonton.com/devonian... Connel's Nursery has an excellent summary of dahlia care posted at http://www.connells-dahlias.com/instruct... .

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic