Dahlias Are Such Showoffs—and I Love Them for It
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A friend stopped by the other day for coffee. After pouring a cup, she went into the living room to sit down. I followed her in and found her standing, transfixed, in front of a bouquet of dahlias I had cut and arranged that morning.
“They don’t even look real,” she said.
And that’s the thing. They don’t look real. They look like someone’s fever dream of a flower.
They are spectacular, modest, small, huge, colorful, pristinely white, spotted, streaked, ladylike, flamboyant, serene, and barking mad.
They’re easy to grow but prima donnas to maintain.
Most of the flowers I grow last a week or more in a vase. Dahlias last five days at most in a vase—but it’s a fantastic five days.
I’m all about low maintenance gardening—except for my dahlias.
Because when a flower looks like this, it can do whatever it wants.
The best part? You can grow these magical beings in your own yard.
They come up out of the dirt just like dandelions—but there the resemblance ends.
How My Dahlia Addiction Started
In Pittsburgh, dahlias weren’t a big thing among my circle of gardening friends. In fact, no one I knew grew dahlias, and there weren’t many varieties available at local nurseries. I started growing a few because I liked the big blooms and vivid colors, which provided a welcome contrast to the more sedate perennials planted in the rest of my yard.
After losing my first dahlia tubers to a bitter Pittsburgh winter, I discovered that they needed to be dug up in late fall and stored where they can stay cool and dry through the winter.
At the time, virtually every inch of my yard was planted. During the growing season, I spent 30 hours a week tending to my garden. Digging up tubers, storing them, and replanting them in the spring was too much work.
So I did the next best thing. I planted my tubers in large pots, buried the pots in my garden in the spring, dug up the pots in late fall, and stored them in my garage over the winter.
That approach worked for me and my dahlias—until I gave up my house and my yard and moved to Florida for a great job opportunity.
Two decades later, when I bought my Portland house, I decided that dahlias and I needed to get reacquainted, stat.
Pacific Northwest – Dahlia Heaven
When I moved into my house, I was astounded to discover the enormous variety of dahlias available. It turns out that the dahlias are particularly well suited to the Pacific Northwest’s climate—and because of that, the PNW has a very well-established dahlia-growing culture.
Additionally, Swan Island Dahlias, the largest dahlia grower in the United States, is a mere 23 miles away from my house.
Kismet.
I decided to start my dahlia garden in pots, just like I did in my Pittsburgh house, and see what happened.
I bought two dahlia tubers—Stiletto, a red cactus-style dahlia—and one potted dahlia already in flower (whose name I never wrote down and promptly forgot). I planted both in large pots with assorted coleus plants and waited to see what happened.
The potted dahlia flowered all summer, adding elegance and exuberant color to my back patio.
Unfortunately, I had chosen a short, bushy variety intended for pots and beds, not cutting.
For that, I had to wait…and wait…and WAIT for the tubers to flower.
A month after breaking ground, the dahlias started taking over the pot from the other plants like the bad asses that they are.
A month after that, flower buds started appearing.
Then, one by one, like a striptease in reverse, a bloom began to open, petal by petal.
Then, the fireworks began.
It was magical. These perfect, unreal, spectacular blooms coming from (basically) an ugly, knobbly, potato-ish thing I planted in a pot two months ago.
Then, like the very best prima donnas, the dahlias took over their pots and all surrounding real estate.
I was absolutely fine with that—to the point that, three years later, I have 30 dahlia varieties thriving in my back yard.
In that time, I’ve learned a lot more about dahlias than I knew when I stuck those Stiletto tubers in the dirt during my first Spring in my little green home.
What I’ve Learned About Dahlias
Dahlia Plants Are Thirsty
Dahlias are a mass of contradictions. They start out as tubers that scream in pain and despair and quickly rot when waterlogged. The planting information that comes with dahlia tubers (I buy from Swan Island Dahlias) tells you in seven different positions to NOT water your dahlias after planting but wait until the tubers have sprouted.
HOWEVER. Once your plants have sprouted, they become the Thirstiest Beings On The Planet. They don’t like to be soggy, but they do need to be watered frequently and deeply. The bigger the plants get (and they can get really, really big), the more water they need.
No water, no flowers.
The cadence that works for me is to water my dahlia beds and potted dahlias every other day without fail from May through October. My water bill doubles in the summer.
And then, in November, dahlias revert to being water-averse tubers. We’ll get to that a few sections from now.
Dahlias Love Poop
Dahlias’ absolute favorite thing is cow manure.
Cow manure gives dahlias all the things they love—nutrients, organic matter, and moisture management.
Dahlias are heavy feeders. Each tuber builds an astonishingly large infrastructure of stems, leaves, roots, and flowers in just a few months. Composted cow manure supplies nitrogen along with smaller amounts of phosphorus, potassium and micronutrients.
Over time I’ve come up with a fertilization scheme that works for my dahlia garden.
I use a bagged plant compost/cow manure blend that I spread three inches thick in my dahlia beds after planting tubers in the spring. After the tubers sprout, I foliar-feed my dahlias every week with a 5-10-10 liquid fertilizer that’s lower in nitrogen than in phosphorus and potassium. Nitrogen encourages leaf production at the expense of flowers—not so great if what you’re going for are big blooms.
Which is the point of growing dahlias.
Dahlias Are Drama Queens
If I am even a couple of hours late watering my dahlias, they droop so dramatically that they look like they are going to DIE at any minute.
I can practically hear them say, “OMG WE ARE DYING AND YOU DON’T CARE, YOU BITCH.”
But then you get this from a bud literally overnight…
I usually prefer my drama to come from books, TV, and movies, but when a bloom like this is the first thing you see on a summer morning, well, I stick to my watering schedule.
Bring on the drama.
Dahlias Require Special Handling in the Winter
Dahlias are warm-climate plants native to Mexico and Central America, so freezing winters are definitely not their thing.
After dahlia blooming season is over, your dahlias will turn dramatically black overnight as a result of the first freeze. Again, drama queens.
Once the plants turn black, you essentially have a bunch of tubers in the ground getting waterlogged—especially during late fall in rainy Portland—and threatening to rot and/or freeze at any minute.
So, quick like a bunny, you need to cut down the blackened plants, lift your tubers out of the ground, store them over the winter, watch them carefully, and then replant them in the spring.
After a summer of growth and pushing out many blooms, dahlias need at least three months of rest in order to do it at all over again the following year.
Like the Three Bears, your stored tubers can’t get too hot or too cold during that three-month period. They also can’t get too wet or too dry. Most dahlia growers recommend checking your stored tubers monthly to make sure they aren’t sprouting (too warm), shriveling (too dry), cracked (too cold), or rotted (all of the above).
It’s a lot.
The first time I tried this, I was four weeks into recovery after hip replacement surgery. I had just started walking unaided a few days before the first frost. I was woozy and exhausted from having three joint replacement surgeries in 11 months.
Needless to say, it was an epic fail. Because I was moving so slowly, every tuber shriveled before I could get it stored.
I lost everything.
But, that winter, I not only reordered the dahlias I lost, I decided to build a new bed and plant more in the spring—so I doubled my order.
That spring and summer was spectacular dahlia-wise but marred by a late-summer surgery to repair a deviated septum that I had put off until I literally couldn't breathe out of that side of my nose.
Post-surgery, I looked for an easier alternative to the traditional overwintering technique to avoid another epic fail, and found an alternative specifically for dahlias planted in raised beds.
It was risky, but I decided to try it, encouraged by weather pundits’ predictions for a mild Portland winter.
After the first frost, I cut down the blackened stalks, put down three inches of a compost/cow manure blend in each raised bed, covered the beds with heavy plastic tarp, and clamped the tarp to the beds with heavy-duty clamps. To keep water from collecting, I put buckets underneath the tarp to allow the water to drain off.
Then I crossed my fingers.
In April, I peeked under the tarp. To my astonishment, the tubers had sprouted.
Thanks to a mild winter, every dahlia survived.
Dahlias Are Worth the Trouble
Every day, when I walk out my back door, I pinch myself at the sight of my dahlias.
Yes, they are a lot of trouble, but when you get blooms like this:
…and this:
…and this:
….I’m willing to go the extra mile, or two, or three.
In Pittsburgh, I spent 30 hours a week from May to October in the garden.
Now I just don’t have that kind of time, so I engineered my garden to be as low maintenance as possible.
Except for the dahlias. They get all the time they want, in part because they are so unapologetic, but mostly because they take my breath away every day they are in bloom.
In fact, I’ve decided to expand my dahlia garden to a third bed in my back yard next summer.
The more, the merrier.
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