6 FERTILIZERS AND 
tubers, and the foliage. It is believed that leaf and 
tuber growth exhausts the plant more than even 
the amazing prodigality of blooming. 
As far back as 1 839, in England, when Paxton wrote 
upon the dahlia, it had been discovered that the soil 
could be too rich. He says: "It is a most fatal error 
to imagine that the flowers of Dahlias will be improved, 
or rendered larger, by being planted in a rich and highly 
nutritive soil; for instead of this being the case, they 
will expend all their strength in producing shoots and 
leaves, and the flowers will be few in number, and much 
impoverished; or they will be so rank and coarse, as to 
lose all that beauty of form which is so much desired in 
the Dahlia." 
In the autumn of 1921 a Maryland gardener 
was moved to write: "I have been well acquainted 
with the fact that dahlias should not be planted in 
heavily manured soil, but this season I planted a row 
between the peonies, and though they were staked and 
tied, the stakes were entirely insufficient, for the plants 
grew over six feet tall, and fell over on the ground. 
Nothing but a six-foot stake would have held them. 
Hereafter the dahlias will go into poorer soil." 
There seems to be unanimous agreement that barn- 
yard and stable manure is the best fertilizer for dahlias 
of all the animal manures. Of commercial fertilizers 
bone meal is far ahead of every other kind, and in a soil 
of good natural fertility bone meal is the only addi- 
