Dahlias

I have had a very mixed relationship with dahlias. 

One day when I was returning to school, I was given some small plants which were apparently called “dahlias”. They were for the housekeeper of my house who definitely deserved some sort of reward for the ordeal she went through with us. 

My last instruction was, “don’t forget to disbud them!” 

I hadn’t the faintest idea of what this meant. 

I handed over the plants and then watched them grow over the next few months. One day, I noticed that some buds had formed so I boldly went out into the garden and removed all the buds. Surely that is what “disbudding” means. 

Much later, I noticed a rather puzzled housekeeper looking at the plants. 

It was only many years later that I discovered that “disbudding” did not mean removing all the buds. It means sacrificing some buds to enable larger buds to produce large flowers . . .

Gardening is not my favourite pastime, in fact I hate it as a pastime. But I love plants when they produce beautiful flowers. I also love seeing the bumble bees, butterflies and birds enjoying the flowers. 

The biggest garden we ever had was about five acres of water meadow, forest and steeply sloping grass. I couldn’t imagine doing enough gardening to improve such a large area. 

Then it came to me. Dahlias! 

Dahlias not only produce profusions of buds, they also make a lot of tubas after they have bloomed. 

I therefore went out and bought some dahlias and planted them in an area near some old trees which I had just chopped down. 

They bloomed very happily without my doing anything for them. I then  dug them up and stored the tubas in a shed for the Winter. Each dahlia had grown about twenty tubas around the original tuba. This yielded about fifteen tubas with eyes that could sprout the next season.

With each dahlia producing fifteen tubas, my original twenty dahlias produced three hundred dahlias in the second season and 4,500 dahlias in the third season. I simply dug a trench and threw them in both succeeding years. The third season need several very long series of trenches. 

I cannot say what happened in the fourth season as we sold the house when the dahlias were in full bloom. Our buyers were very pleased. 

In our present house, we had no plans to grow dahlias. They are not hardy plants so it requires some time spent gardening in Autumn and Spring. 

One day in early June I found some dahlia seeds. I had never seen or used dahlia seeds so I brought some home and managed to get two of them going in small pots. Later I planted them in a small space in the centre of one of our flower beds. 

To our amazement, these two plants took over the flower bed and grew to over five feet in height. They dominated the garden. 

In November, I lifted them and counted twenty tubas on each stem which will probably give me thirty next year. 

Now I am looking at our small garden and thinking  2. 30.  450.  6750.  

101,250 . . . . . . . . .  Maybe we ought to move house in a few years time?