It’s time to unpack the dahlias and Frances Palmer is surrounded by 25 large cardboard boxes full of tubers that she dug up last fall and stored in the frost-free cellar of her shed.
To complete the coal-to-Newcastle scene, several boxes of new tubers she ordered also just arrived. Who could have resisted ordering them, even if he already owned a huge winter stock?
Not Mrs. Palmer, a ceramist from Weston, Connecticut, whose art and garden have intertwined and grown over three decades. Each has informed the other and taken on a bit of its form and character.
Dahlias to the max — apparently too many dahlias can’t exist. As she put it, “They’re just so happy.”
The products of her two forms of self-expression have posed together for many portraits as Ms. Palmer, 66, has cultivated a third creative pursuit: photography. The images populate her popular Instagram account and her 2020 book, “Life in the Studio: Inspiration and Lessons on Creativity.”
Mrs. Palmer’s ceramics are very distinctive, but fully functional. These vases, dinnerware and serving pieces are intended to be sold and used. From the start she wanted to document her designs and realized she could give a sense of scale by working in some of the props. Like flowers in the vases.
“That was really my impetus to start gardening,” she said. Once she did, no flower tugged at her harder than the dahlia.
In her connection with them, Ms. Palmer is in good company with creative women, including Frida Kahlo (whom she grew in her garden in Mexico, where dahlias are native, and she was often pictured wearing them like a crown). Vanessa Bell, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, grew and painted dahlias on Charleston Farm in East Sussex, England, and a memorable photograph by contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama as a child shows her with four giant specimens.
That’s not really a surprise, given the flowers’ vibrant color palette, sculptural geometry (the shapes include absurd pom poms and balls as well as spiky cactus-like blooms), and size (from less than two inches to nearly a foot across).
While she doesn’t want to put a number on it, Ms. Palmer acknowledges that she grows “hundreds” of dahlia plants per season, each with just enough room for the tomato cage she supports. The goal: an abundant flower harvest.
“Since my garden functions as a cutting garden, I just use the tomato cages and they go cheek by cheek,” she said.
The plants fill two large, fenced gardens: four 4-by-5-meter beds in one space, and 30 raised beds 4-by-8-foot or more on top of an old tennis court, where she also has several beehives.
And it’s not just dahlias she grows for cutting.
“There’s a lot going on,” she said, ticking off a blooming cascade from spring bulbs to sweet peas, annual poppies, and native plants like asters and verbena (Vernonia) that peak at the same time as the dahlias. “But the dahlias always get the best – and the most – real estate, and everything else gets shoved in between. It’s kind of chaotic.”
Visitors to its annual Garden Conservancy Open Day (this year’s September 30) don’t seem to mind.
Everything appears in delightful excess, unfolding toward “a great crescendo in the garden,” from the moment the dahlias get going, about mid-July, until the frost says to stop and those cardboard boxes are loaded again.
So many Dahlias, so little space
Most of us will never attempt to grow “hundreds” of dahlias – not even over many seasons. There are nearly 11,000 named dahlias on the American Dahlia Society’s Compiled List of Varieties, from 1976 to the present; list of international groups even more. The largest source in the United States, Swan Island Dahlias, has over 400.
So which one should we look for?
It’s a topic Ms. Palmer, who also recommends Ferncliff Gardens, Old House Gardens, and Queen Valley Farm as sources, discusses with New York Botanical Garden students in the Dauntless Dahlias course she’s taught every March and October since 2015. .
“Think abstract versus specific,” she advises. Consider what colors, shapes and forms you prefer – and what scale.
“Don’t obsess over the names of the dahlias, because if you can’t find them, it’s really irrelevant,” she tells her students, projecting images of striking examples. “You can find something that looks pretty much the same. If you want a pink cactus dahlia, it doesn’t have to be the specific one I’m showing you.
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have favorites. Pressed to name names, she does: yellow, peony-shaped Meadowburn Old Tweet, for example, and Juanita, a six-inch-wide cactus type in deep red. Also Cafe au Lait, the lightest peach or barely pink, which is often used in weddings.
Some are extra flashy, like Bodacious (big, bright orange petals with yellow undersides), Myrtle’s Brandy (distinctive, reflected red petals with white tips), and Deuil du Roi Albert (purple tipped in white). Bishop of Llandaff has screaming, semi-double scarlet flowers and dark purple foliage.
The list goes on. She always gives way to flowers of velvety black-red (perhaps giant Spartacus or smaller Paul Smith) and “a good orange” (Clyde’s Choice can reach a foot across). Pink (maybe the huge Otto’s Thrill) and white (Walter Hardisty, another big boy) are also musts. At least one color – yellow, which she once hated – has grown on her thanks to her relationship with dahlias.
In each hue, she said, she looks for an array of shapes and sometimes shades, “so that when I put them together you have a beautiful diversity of shape and color and size.” When you have a little bit of everything, it’s so easy to put together something that looks lavish.”
Home-grown zinnias and marigolds are among the other ingredients in that abundance; so do copper fennel, nasturtiums, and even strands of clematis vines.
A simplifying tactic she suggests if you want to get started: Shop by a color or shape theme.
“If you like yellow, buy yellow dahlias that are pom poms or decorative or cactus,” she said, “so you have a variety of shape and form. Even if you decided to grow only boldahlias for a year and only If you had boldahlias in different colors or sizes, you would have a fantastic garden.”
Tips from a grower: from planting and pinching to storage
Except in zones 8 to 10, where they are perennials, dahlia tubers are planted outdoors as annuals, around the time of tomato transplant. Mrs. Palmer plans hers in mid-May, around Mother’s Day.
There’s no room in a greenhouse or under lights to pot up all those overwintered corms for a head start, but new mail-order ones usually arrive long before it’s safe to put them outside and can dry out if left in their boxes. She plants them, or at least puts them in a container with potting soil.
In May, every tomato cage from her gigantic collection is put into service, displayed in the gardens with a pole or two to strengthen them. A tuber is planted under each plant so that a few centimeters of soil pass over it. A tag with the dahlia’s name is attached to the cage.
“The most important thing about planting a dahlia tuber is getting your support system in place immediately,” Ms. Palmer said. As the plants grow, she uses biodegradable jute twine for further support, and perhaps another stake for the tallest. Where cages may seem out of place, you can only use bamboo poles and rope.
Also important: When the first stem reaches 6 to 12 inches (15 to 30 cm), Mrs. Palmer pinches the center bud to promote bushiness.
A second pinch, or fluff, can encourage long stems to cut. As the plants prepare to produce flowers later, they form three buds at the end of each branch; pinch off the outer two in each group. Mrs. Palmer repeats as the plants continue to flower.
Every few weeks through the summer, she dilutes the fish emulsion with water in a two-gallon sprayer, and “the roses, the tomatoes, the dahlias — everyone gets a spray, all over the yard,” she said.
And they continue to grow, until the first frost. Ideally, Mrs. Palmer will wait until a week or two after the plants turn black, then cut them back and dig them out. But sometimes the frost comes so late that she has to dig before it arrives.
She brushes away clods of earth and spreads the tubers out to dry in the shed for about a week. Then she cuts the stems to a length of about two to four inches, packs the corms into her boxes with a wood shavings from the farm store labeled as horse litter, and back they go into the cellar.
Oh, but wait: there’s one more step. Don’t forget to tie the label to the stem of the tuber before storing – that is, if you can keep the dug-up cuties straight.
“And I’m trying,” Mrs. Palmer said. ‘Although it is a Kafkaesque exercise to label the tubers with names after I have cured them. Fortunately, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter to me.”
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A way to gardenand a book of the same name.
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