WHY DAHLIAS DELIGHT 



CHARLTON BURGESS BOLLES 



Wide Diversity of Form and Hue — Adaptability to Garden Conditions Everywhere — Freedom 

 from Disease and Insect Pests — Simple Requirements in the Way of Soil and Cultivation 



HY do you grow Dahlias? 1 make various answers, 

 all truthful, to this question I am sometimes asked. 

 Because I cannot help it ! Because the rewards are so 

 j full for so little effort ! Because I love color, and grow- 

 ing Dahlias is an easy way of making my garden as gay and 

 many-colored as an Oriental rug! 



Like the Peony, the Dahlia seems practically immune from 

 most of the inevitable pests and plant diseases to which the 

 other favorites of the garden are heir. Hosts of amateurs can 

 be found who have never experienced any trouble worth 

 mentioning. One enthusiast had ten years of complete freedom 

 from pests, but in the next season, in a suburb where poultry 

 keeping was not proper grasshoppers stripped his blooms to 

 the centre. The beginner can confidently take up Dahlia grow- 

 ing, sure of an excellent crop of blooms and tubers year after year, 

 freer of insect and disease annoyances than any other gardener in 

 whatsoever line. Dahlias are a far surer crop than Corn or 

 Potatoes. 1 once demonstrated, on a measured acre of infertile, 

 hard clay soil, a good crop of blooms and a harvest of large and 

 abundant tubers, while Potatoes and Corn growing alongside 

 were complete failures. 



Of course, the list of insect enemies and plant diseases that 

 have afflicted the Dahlia here and there is a considerable one. 

 Insects injure Dahlias in one locality that have never been seen 

 in a lifetime somewhere else. 



But one Dahlia tuber absolutely ensures anywhere from a 

 score to half a hundred perfect flowers, sometimes fifty in bloom 

 at one time on a single plant! A dozen, or say twenty tubers, 

 means five hundred or a thousand gorgeous flowers. And how 

 the plants multiply! Each tuber produces from eight to 

 eighteen others — the average is thirteen. 



The Dahlia has had its ups and downs in the public's fickle 

 mind. Yet I doubt if any garden bloom has enjoyed a more 

 spectacular rise into favor or more marvellous development, 

 unless one excepts Holland's Tulip craze. 



ENTHUSIASTS find language inadequate to describe and 

 characterize their favorite. One man, an amateur for 

 years, now giving all his time as a commercial grower to the 

 Dahlia, believes that it is the most gorgeous, brilliant, dazzling 

 flower found in the temperate zone — the bloom that sells at 

 sight as a cut flower. Another grower calls it the flower able 

 to express itself in as many wonderful forms as the Chrysanthe- 

 mum, but with five times as much variety of foliage. A third de- 

 votee claims that it outclasses the Rose in color combinations and 

 number of vivid shades; bloomingcontinuouslyfrom mid-July un- 

 til killed by frost. It may well be deemed the Rose of autumn. 



The amateur can raise larger, finer, more beautiful Dahlias 

 than the professional, commercial grower — after he knows how! 

 He can sit up nights with his pets and count it all joy. But 

 numberless flower lovers in the United States have never seen 

 that beautiful, amazing thing, a Dahlia Show. 



A clergyman wrote me in February, from a latitude that was 

 then enjoying zero temperature, asking if it was too late to start 

 Dahlia tubers "for this year's blooming." A remarkably 

 successful man whose profession was business engineering had 

 Dahlias planted on his fine suburban property, remarking that 

 he supposed they grew about like Tulips. A hydro-engineer, 

 who has built gigantic electrical installations all over the globe 

 told me sorrowfully that his Dahlias were a failure, and I found 

 that he had planted each field clump exactly as it had been dug 

 the autumn previously. 



Many plant the tuber vertically in the ground, with the 

 sprout almost visible, and if the plants are so unfortunate as to 

 be near the kitchen they receive a daily "watering" from hose 

 or dishpan. After frost the poor tubers are laid up on a warm 

 shelf in the cellar, or put near the furnace out of mistaken and 

 unfortunate goodwill. Peradventure, with a different tempera- 

 ment, they are stacked up near the cellar door, and Jack Frost 

 does his perfect work for the commercial brother with a 

 catalog. 



CULTIVATION of the Dahlia is comparatively simple. 

 The tuber, or green plant, whichever is chosen, is planted 

 six inches deep in April, May, June, or the first half of July, 

 according to climatic conditions, in soil deeply plowed or dug, 

 moderately but never excessively rich. A generous handful of 

 bonemeal for each tuber may be safely added. The surface of 

 the soil is kept free of weeds; and by a three to four inch deep 

 stirring with hoe or cultivator, drying out of the earth is pre- 

 vented until blooming time, when cultivation should never 

 exceed two inches in depth, because feeding roots are now near 

 the surface. A top dressing of fertilizers once a week for im- 

 provement of blooms after flowering has begun make the results 

 as certain as anything can be in horticulture. 



Dahlias, like Roses, abominate wet feet. A generous portion 

 of the soil of the plot should be humus. Fifty per cent, of 

 average, ordinary soil is not soil at all, but air and water. If 

 you can add only twenty-five per cent, of humus (composted, 

 decayed vegetable matter) you increase the air content and at 

 the same time wonderfully increase the ground's moisture- 

 holding capacity. Dahlias are sometimes failures, usually due 

 to too rich rather than too poor soil; too early and too shallow 

 planting, too much rather than too little water. Plants that 

 are tall, luxuriant, rankly growing, bearing few blooms, are 

 either in soil too rich in nitrogen, or they do not have sunshine 

 enough, or they have too much water. Any one of these con- 

 ditions is likely to result in poor and scanty flowering. The 

 home gardener sometimes allows all three conditions to afflict 

 his cherished plants. 



Cultivation with rake, hoe, or horse-drawn implement is the 

 one rule that has no variation, and applies equally to every 

 locality and to all climates. Cultivation will produce fine 

 Dahlias in any soil; the lack of it means failure though all else be 

 supplied. 



There seems to be unanimous agreement that barnyard and 

 stable manure is the best of all the animal manure fertilizers for 

 Dahlias, applied well rotted, not green, when the soil is suf- 

 ficiently poor to require it. Good average farm or garden soil 

 will not need it for a first year's planting. 



Bonemeal is the ideal Dahlia fertilizer. It seems impossible 

 to use too much of it. One hundred pounds to three hundred 

 square feet will do no harm ; a coffeecupf ul for each tuber when 

 planted in holes. Decomposing slowly, it will be even better the 

 second year than the first, for Dahlias may be planted upon the 

 same ground year in and year out. Bonemeal is rich in phos- 

 phoric acid and affords the plants a slow, safe supply. Seed 

 cannot be produced without this element. With the addition 

 of wood ashes, a generous handful per plant, raked in at bloom- 

 ing time to intensify brilliancy of color and give strength to tuber 

 growth (for all root crops require potash), anywhere, anytime, 

 nothing is better than bonemeal. A complete potato fertilizer 

 with the addition of an equal bulk of bonemeal is a combination 

 that brings excellent results. 



170 



