A GATHERING OF EAGLES

Playing host to the American Dahlia Society's national show is a huge undertaking that reaches far beyond borders of any town, city or state. The Portland Dahlia Society has put together an amazing opportunity for dahlia growers from around the country and yes, the world, to come together to unite around our common obsession. The very best growers and hybridizers will all be here, more than willing to share their expertise as well as their enthusiasm - a chance for fledglings like myself to try our wings just a bit! If you have been reading my blog, you probably already know that this has been a very difficult year for North Central Washington dahlia growers. It turns out that the soil at our demonstration garden has most likely been contaminated by the repeated plowing of salted snow and snow melting chemicals onto our garden's surface during the cold Wenatchee winters. This factor, combined with the relentlessly hot months of July and August has killed, stunted and burnt many of our plants, resulting in a very sick looking garden. This has caused a great deal of disappointment, not only among those of us in the club who grow and maintain that garden, but for the people in our town who look forward to what had become an annual explosion of colors and forms that are so characteristic of dahlias. We are doing the best we can under the circumstances, and most of us are looking to our home gardens to produce the blooms that are most likely to be "show-worthy." With the ADS show in our back yard this year, I was especially hopeful that I might have something to enter in my first-ever national show. If you grow dahlias, you will know that timing is everything, and also that there is very little you can do if Mother Nature decides that Narrows Tricia or Snoho Doris would be ready for the show LAST week instead of today. If you are a small grower, with 100 plants or less, it is often difficult to have everything be perfectly mature all at once, especially if you have been harvesting for other shows and fairs. As I looked out on my garden yesterday, I thought I might have three or four blooms that I might be able to enter in the show. I was thrilled, however, to see that I actually came up with 15 or 16 stems that might survive through staging on Saturday morning! I have them in my hotel room here at the Red Lion at Jantzen Beach, in the dark and extremely cool bathroom, discouraging any further development to be best of my non-Mother Nature ability, hoping that no one decides to be precocious and thwart my efforts to get at least one blue ribbon that says "ADS First Premium." I left Wenatchee with my "babies" around 8:30 this morning, and arrived in Portland, blooms intact, around 7 hours later. At the Thursday night reception, I met up with Brad and Rosemary Freeman, as well as Bob and Terry Schroeder and Roland and Sandy Verrone. I was able to glean valuable information by visiting with a number of growers on topics ranging from endlessly hot days (a man from Georgia has similar challenges), misting and shade cloth systems (a grower from California) and the virtues of growing dahlias in Cleveland as compared to Arizona (very difficult, if not impossible!) I was even able to visit with the senior judge that I worked with at the Spokane show last weekend (Claudia Biggs) before it was time to go out and try to catch a glimpse of the August Blue Moon and the tawny sunset over the Columbia River. I never tire of driving South and West from North Central Washington, through the orchards, vineyards and rolling hills of my neighborhood to the basalt cliffs of the Columbia River Gorge, and past the potato, corn and onion patches of Quincy, through the canyons of Vantage and Ellensburg, being awestruck by the images of Mt. Rainier, Mt. Adams and finally, Mt. Hood. I rolled South and into the Dalles, past the windy gap of the river that creates the natural border between Washington and Oregon, past Multnomah Falls, finally arriving at this incredible venue. If you have never had the chance to visit the Pacific Northwest, I hope you find time to come here, especially during late summer and early fall, when the dahlias are at their very best.