From Ash To Offering

A dahlia farm brings hope to a scorched corner of the Santa Cruz Mountains

BY JESSICA TUNIS

Beeline Blooms is a love offering to community, first and foremost. Standing in her flower field, squinting against the late afternoon sun, Karla DeLong gestures toward the burned mountain landscape around us, her impetus for founding this nonprofit dahlia farm.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the CZU wildfires destroyed 86,509 acres of forest and homes. Black tree trunks still darken the hillside and the sun now reaches places on the ground where it never did before. Temperature, wind and light all move differently through the changed landscape since the loss of forest canopy.

The DeLong family has lived and gardened on this property just off Alba Road for 15 years, and though their own house was spared in the fire, it was one of the few in the area that survived. The CZU fire destroyed many neighboring houses as well as outbuildings, orchard and beehives on the DeLong’s property, and came within three feet of their kitchen. In the aftermath of CZU, there was much grief to be processed—for the loss of sheltering trees and beloved neighbors, and for life as it was before. An uprooted feeling of living in a burned landscape pervaded the community.

Every window that looked out of the DeLong house framed some kind of tragedy: an empty building pad, a stand of dead firs, a heap of hastily cut logs left by PG&E. With the whole landscape scorched and her community scattered, DeLong filled her home with houseplants, just to have something green to tend. As she tended her own grief, she knew that others were suffering as well. “What do you do when someone is grieving, or feeling sad?” she asks rhetorically. “You bring them flowers.”

The sun kept shining in mercilessly through the windows and on the empty, burned ground outside, illuminating both what had been lost and the potential for new growth. In the newly sunny flat area outside the spared house, DeLong created Beeline Blooms dahlia farm to provide beauty, maybe even a bit of healing, to a traumatized community. She has always been drawn to tending things: ample food gardens and flowers, bees and beloved dogs, family and friends. Community aggregates wherever she is, because one of her great gifts is the way she cares for people, and growing things alike.

From the farm’s inception, DeLong and her family imagined that fire survivors would drop by to pick free bouquets, a simple love offering to anyone affected by the tragedy/blazes. But even before the first blooms opened, they found that there was a deeper unmet need that the farm was filling, a sense of investing in hope, and in the creation of something beautiful. Volunteers showed up to plant dahlia tubers, lay irrigation tape, weed and prune, pound stakes and stretch twine to support the growing plants. Rows were planted in blocks of color to resemble a rainbow.

Once the flowers opened, in a riot of colors, visitors flocked to take home armloads of bouquets, or to take advantage of the free family portraits among the blooms, which photographer Orenda Randuch generously offered to fire survivors. Photographer Jackie Fogerty came regularly as well, to volunteer on the farm and capture the dahlias against the backdrop of the Milky Way.

“Everyone that came to the flower field took what they needed,” DeLong says. “Some people went immediately to the bright, raucous colors, reds, oranges and yellows. Others were drawn to the cool, calm rows: pink, lavender and white.” Some of us needed bright, cheerful hope, and some of us craved soothing. Whatever the mood, there is a dahlia hue to represent it.

Beeline Blooms has brought beauty to the community and is actively seeking garden volunteers for the 2023 growing season.

The diversity of dahlias is what keeps DeLong interested; with their complex octopoid genetics and their rapid growth rates, the flowers offer a fertile ground for hybridization.

The roots, or shall we say the tubers, of a thing matter. The seeds, the beginnings. Founded as an offering to community, the community responded with generosity in kind, contributing almost $10,000 to the rebuilding of the Alba Schoolhouse, through on-site donations, pop-ups and photography events. Free bouquets were dispatched to retirement homes, weddings and street fairs, friends and neighbors and strangers, local rebuild sites and people who had lost their homes in the fire. Flowers were donated to events with Campesina Womb Justice and the Teen Kitchen Project. Like a dahlia itself, with a short growing season, Beeline Blooms burst into existence and flowered profusely for the summer of 2022.

The winter was an intentionally fallow time, a deep breath after the flurry of fire recovery, the abundance of dahlia season, the sweat that it took to get the farm off the ground so quickly. As the growing season begins again, the dahlia tubers are sprouting, just beginning their yearly transformation. The greenhouse as well as the guest shower are once again full of cuttings, made to expand the field, sell or donate for the coming season.

Things may look different at Beeline this year. A lifelong gardener, DeLong knows that sometimes the responsibility a farmer has to their plants is to prevent them from overbearing, to prune them back when they are stretched beyond their capacity to sustain such bounty. Sometimes that wild abundance is medicine for a time, and sometimes it needs to shift in order to be sustainable.

I asked her what she thought that might look like in the upcoming season, and she replied. “The truth is I really don’t know. Last year was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, the birthing of an idea. Creating something of myself from the dirt and sun. The spring was so late that I’m laying claim to taking my time deciding just what my intentions for the 2023 season will be.

“I daydream of standing again in the field, full of life and joy and healing, with family, friends and neighbors. Creating a space, welcoming folks back to the mountain. Our community needs it more than ever. Our fire survivors are being forgotten and they need us to remember that only a few homes and lives have been rebuilt after being destroyed by the CZU fire. The honest answer is I intend to do my best by these people, the flowers, bees and our greater community.

“What I can say is that I have already made more than 400 dahlia cuttings, acquired 159 new dahlia varieties and I’m sprouting 500 dahlia tubers. I guess that sounds like I’ll be farming this year. Ask me around the Summer Solstice and I bet I will know by then just what kind of farm it will be!”

Beeline Blooms

220 Stephens Lane, Ben Lomond beelineblooms.com

Jessica Tunis lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains and spends her time tending gardens, telling stories, and cultivating adventure and good food in wild places.