Fall rituals: Finding next year’s dahlias

As I write, the autumnal equinox is upon us — the day when light and dark are served in equal measures. It’s the perfect reminder that fall is coming and with it my annual fall rituals.

Rituals might be too heady a word. These rituals don’t involve dancing in the moonlight so much as scouring plant catalogs for seeds, spring bulbs and dahlias.

Erica Browne Grivas Get Growing

September is a perfect time to evaluate your garden’s dahlia game and scout for new recruits. Late August through early September is the time of festivals offered by dahlia societies and growers. If you missed these, don’t worry. This year was a slow one for dahlias, thanks to the endless and clammy spring we had, so there are still scads of blooms to enjoy at public gardens.

Trial gardens are perfect places to find your new favorites.

The Bellevue Botanic Garden and Volunteer Park have dahlia trial gardens planted by the Puget Sound Dahlia Association that will have blossoms to astound and delight. The show should go through October (or when the membership digs the tubers up for storage). Another trial garden is at the Point Defiance Park in Tacoma.

If there is a downside, it’s that some of these dahlias are so new they’re unavailable in the trade. I’m waiting for “Sandia Gold,” which I spied at the BBG in 2021.

I think that’s what the washed-out marker on the stake read, anyway. It looked like a cabbage rose in butterscotch — minus the blackspot. Let me know if you see it.

The good news is that if you fall for some of these dahlias and they have been introduced for sale, you can likely find them at one of the PSDA’s sales around town next March. Botanical gardens’ regular displays, such as at the BBG and the Center for Urban Horticulture, usually have established varieties nicely tagged.

There’s a lot to love about dahlias. The more you cut them, the more flowers they send out. They aren’t prone to many pests or diseases, although it can be helpful to protect emerging tubers from slugs with cloches or slug bait and provide good air circulation to avoid powdery mildew. Dahlias also are promiscuous plants. Like a potato, one tuber can produce 20 or 30 more in a season. This makes them an economical crop if a variety is a reliable tuber-producer. With the pots in my driveway, I should be able to start a small dahlia farm in the next two seasons.