What Is the Most Beautiful Flower in the World? Dahlias, a Love Story

Due to popular demand, also a guide to planting and caring for your own dahlia garden. I picked these for you, from our own little dahlia garden.

Dear Beautiful Friends,

I’m full-on into a couple obsessions this month:

1. Finishing my book (it’s about late-in-life marriage, not at 38 but 50)

2. DAHLIAS, LUSCIOUS DAHLIAS

Here in the Pacific Northwest the dahlias are still going gangbusters, but ours are starting to droop and hang, ready to be cut, vased, and shown off to the world.

I know I pelted you with dahlias last week, but … obsessions are beautiful too.

Steve and I have had dahlia gardens in our last two homes. They are the flower that keeps on giving. They bloom and bloom and bloom, then insist you cut flowers and take them inside so they can bloom and bloom and keep stinking blooming!

I brought these flowers, below, in yesterday afternoon. It’s been a very good year, despite the deer nibbling at them. We had to put up a net.

I’ve taken a thousand pictures of dahlias this year: bouquets, gardens, singular flowers, up-close-and-personal pictorials, dahlia porn. I can’t stop.

Raise your hand if you, like me, enjoy a good obsession/possession. The right kind, of course, not some kind of thievery spree of breaking into homes looking for porcelain squirrels. I love a full-on obsession with a topic, an activity, a curiosity, new band, artist, that kind of thing. When my pal Stephanie went whole hog into BTS and K-pop during covid, I could not have been happier watching how she was using her new possession to point people toward good mental health.

If you are tap dancing around a creative obsession/possession, can I invite you to go all in? I love the feel of living inside a healthy obsession. Some might say “healthy obsession” is unhealthy. Pfffaw, I say!

DAHLIAS, a love story, and a guide to planting your own

To some, the most beautiful, visually delicious, prolific flower: luscious, wildly diverse, abundant, staggeringly designed.

I tell everyone to plant dahlias because they go for months.

This is a screenshot from my Photo file, during a visit to Volunteer Park’s dahlia garden, in Seattle.

Some dahlia facts

Where originated: Mesoamerica, principally in the high plains of Mexico

Used for: food for their starchy root tubers by the Aztecs. They used the hollow stems of the Dahlia imperialism to transport water (!).

Favorite places to live: Anywhere with warm days and cool nights, namely the Pacific Northwest.

When to plant: Well after the last frost, depending on the region. Generally spring, or when the soil is at 60 degrees, not that my gardening husband and I have ever taken our soil’s temperature! Here’s a link on planting dahlia tubers. And again, over here we are minimal-fuss gardeners, so if some of this feels too, oh, scientific and precision-demanding, do it your way.

“Shy Di”

Bulbs or tubers? I was writing “bulbs” in an earlier draft, but dahlias are tubers and there’s a difference. Here’s copy lifted from this site that goes into details I can’t quite hit:

Unlike corms or bulbs, tubers do not have a basal plant from which new shoots or roots grow. Tubers produce nodes, buds, or “eyes” all over their surface, which grow up through the soil surface as shoots and stems, or down into the soil as roots. Due to their high nutrient content, many tubers, such as potatoes, are grown as food. Tubers can be cut up into many different pieces, with each piece bearing at least two nodes, and planted individually to create new plants that will be exact replicas of the parent plant. As tubers mature, new tubers may form from their roots and stems.

How many different “kinds”? I read there are anywhere from 20,000 to 65,000 varietals—and 42 '“accepted species.” (Varietals occur within a species.)

Here’s a great visual guide of dahlias and their names.

To dig up the tubers or not? Many people take out their dahlia tubers and store them someplace warm and cozy for the winter, then split them and put them back in their flower bed sometime in . . . spring? I wouldn’t know because Steve and I don’t dig ours up. We are scrappy gardeners. Every year we add some new bulbs thanks to our friend Tom, our bulb dealer, and we sit back and see what comes up.

As Bob Dyllan sang, “Do your thing, you’ll be king*.” (* or Queen/Goddess/Wicken/Witch/A-OK/Roaring Cheetah)

These peppermint patties make me lick my lips. The bee, apparently, agrees.

No photo I took delivers the visual feast of this garden in its semi-entirely.

Volunteer Park’s Dahlia Garden, Seattle.

Anenoma Dahlias

How dahlias got their names: Apparently named after Swedish botanist Anders Dahl. There are a few stories, but: a Mexican botanist sent a gob of dahlias to Sweden and only ONE survived the trip, and that was the Eve of the dahlia genus in Europe. Cool, eh?

I think the name Dahlia matches the flower. How ‘bout you?

Dahlia and friend.

I like putting my phone camera right up to the faces of flowers. Roses are good for this, too. Any flower with folds and curves. Is this:

• Invading personal space?

• A beautiful intimacy that lets the dahlia be “seen”?

• A perfect opportunity for frameable art?

Stare at this for 1 minute. Then, in comments, tell us about it.

Thank you for being part of the Beauty Hunter community. Our aim here is to turn toward Beauty (however you define it) in daily life, and consider beauty’s unconditional nature, even (especially) during troubled times. What if this was the purpose of life?

I have some fun, creative, community offerings coming up this fall and winter, for paid members—including Zoom Creative Hours for anyone who wants a space to do their writing/art/projects in the company of others, and get a little bit of inspo along the way.

If you’re on the fence re: a paid membership I have something for you.
Through Oct 9, get 30% off paid subscription forever. Includes discounts on coaching and other offerings, which at some point I WILL get around to cooking up in my caldron over here. XO

If you’ve tried all the tricks, jumped through all the hoops, and clenched out so much discipline that your jaw still hurts, HERE’S SOMETHING NEW:

Turn toward Beauty as a portal to change. Discounts for BH subscribers.