DAHLIAS - PERFECTLY IMPERFECT

I spent the weekend in Seattle, specifically for the purpose of attending and clerking at the Seattle Dahlia Society's annual show. It was good to get away from our beautiful but smoke-filled valley, socked in as it was following a series of lightning-caused wildfires. Arriving in Seattle on Saturday morning, my spirit was lifted by the blue skies and sunshine that I had not seen for days. I arrived in plenty of time to get my handful of dahlias staged and placed in the large room  at the Lake City Community Center. The parking lot and surrounding street was buzzing with growers packing in crates, cans and wagons replete with dahlias, representative of every color, size and form combination.  I saw old friends as well as new faces, as I scanned the hall to find the proper place to put my AC Ben, Chimacum Troy, Snoho Doris and the other little friends that accompanied me on this fresh-air field trip. It was good to be back, and for the first time, I was entering two blooms in the Giant (AA) class, in honor of my dad, one of the co-founders of the Seattle club. When I first started growing dahlias, I was drawn to some of the more non-traditional forms, such as water lilies, collarettes and anemones, but in the last couple of years, I have been growing more medium, large and giant semi-cactus and informal decorative blooms. This wasn't a deliberate shift - it just seemed to evolve as I attended more shows and visited more gardens. Dad always favored these forms as well, and as a little girl, I was often dwarfed in the garden, by the enormous faces of my happy AA friends of all colors. It just feels good now, to be able to grow some of these big guys, and think how happy Dad would be to know that the family tradition is staying alive. I was thinking, this weekend, just how much I want to grow the very best flowers, and have something that I have entered in the show receive a top prize, taking its place on the head table. Needless to say, this has not yet happened to me.

I had the honor of visiting Danielle and Dick Parshall's garden in Snohomish on Sunday morning. The Parshalls are the originators of Clearview Dahlias, and their seedling beds are filled with flowers that have the potential of running the table at shows. As I arrived, Dick was "roguing out" some of his seedlings, creating a pile of plants and tubers that would never see a full season.  I had never heard that term in relation to dahlia growing, but as a farm kid, Dick was very experienced in this - "roguing" refers to the act of identifying and removing unwanted plants from agricultural fields. I'm so desperate to come up with a good flower that I keep any plant that manages to survive all the stages of growth during a season. However,  Dick and Danielle have made an art out of  identifying, nurturing and improving some of the best varieties of dahlias known to growers across the continent, regularly taking top honors at shows from coast to coast. They have several distinctly different seedling beds - first year seedlings, second and third year seedlings, fourth year seedlings, and so on. My brain got full just thinking about the process of classifying, cataloguing and recording the vital statistics necessary to organize the offspring of this lengthy and deliberate process. Dick made it look easy by making notes and charts in wirebound notebooks, betraying his professional experience as a high school teacher. He and Danielle are meticulous in their observations, benefiting from the analytical bent that they bring to the science of dahlia hybridization. Of course, they have other beds filled with named varieties of their own flowers, as well as some of their favorites from other growers. The care that that the Parshalls exercise throughout their gardens was abundantly evident in the well-tended and weed-free beds that had evolved from growing pumpkins, corn and tomatoes, to a floral Nirvana filled with Clearview Daniels, Louises, Orcas, Tammys, Debbys and Magic, to name just a few.

The irony of this whole process is that the dahlias that we grow and show today are all hybrids. The original, pure form of this flower was a simple open-centered bloom that grew wild in the mountains of Mexico. Today, we work every day to coax our gardens to produce the "perfect" bloom, the one that is recognized by our peers as the very best. Yet, a hybrid, by its very nature, results from the fusion of gametes that have differing structure in at least one chromosome, as the result of structural abnormalities! In other words, we are seeking perfection in something that is required to be imperfect in order to exist. In the words of Gilbert and Sullivan, "It is a Paradox!"

 Dick and Danielle Parshall with Edie.

 Shadecloth protects blooms that might otherwise get more sun than they need.

Clearview Claret....Isn't the color on this just amazing? On my list for next year!

As a counselor, I often confront the idea of perfectionism as one that is destined to cause those afflicted by it to be perpetually frustrated, since everyone knows that there is no such thing as perfect, no matter how relentless we may be in its pursuit. Yet as a dahlia grower and potential hybridizer, I continue to raise the bar for myself, and I witness others of my ilk doing the same thing. We are so driven by the challenge of constantly improving this imperfectly diverse phenomenon, that we go to great lengths to manipulate the outcomes, as we share in the life cycle of the humble dahlia from seed to bloom each season. I never thought of myself as competitive or perfectionistic, yet this avocation has shown me that I love being challenged, pursuing improvement and learning, submitting my work for feedback and integrating new ideas and experimenting with methods that might improve my outcomes. The people that I have met, such as the Parshalls and so many others in the dahlia world, seem to be driven by the same energy that comes from this process, so available to us as dahlia growers and showers. Reconciling the dissatisfaction we so often experience in our gardens, with the thrill we feel when one or more of our blooms seems to be "just perfect" is a journey filled with adventure and discovery, and we love inviting others to walk alongside us and share in the joy.