RE: dahlia, anemone, and monkshood

Hi Claire,
 In reading all your good advice below, I marvel at how crafty & skilled you
are at getting late blooming perennials to perform in your zone 4 climate.
In zone 8 we take for granted Dahlias left in the ground the year around &
abundant blooms from June or July well into October.  Japanese Anemones
bloom so bountifully here with no help from me whatsoever.  My large clumps
of Alice, Pamina, Whirlwind and Madame Honorine Jobert are covered with
hundreds of flowers and buds usually beginning in late August through
October.  Aconitums are easy and faithful bloomers - unless you dig and
divide the clump, which causes them to sulk for a year or 2.
I think Isabelle is quite the gardener for growing Anemone from seed.  That
was one of the perennial crop projects I chose when I was a hort student.
Out of a very large package of seed, I think I had 3, maybe 4 sprout.  But
you only need one plant to get a very large patch started.  They creep along
via lateral root growth and it is easy to cut the new shoots from the mother
plants in February to pot up or give away and keep your patch the size you
desire.
Swan Island Dahlias sends beautiful plump tubers in May.  I have never had a
small or shriveled one arrive.  The tubers are grown here in Oregon, not the
Netherlands.  See them at  www.dahlias.com, they have nice photos too.  My
favorite is a small pink and cream one called Romance.  Bouquets of this
with pink and white anemones are outstanding.
Speaking of nurturing seed grown weeds for 2 years - in my case it was wild
strawberries that were growing in a pot in which I had sown seeds of a
choice species Begonia from the far east.  I kept thinking those leaves
looked familiar.......sigh.

Marilyn Dube'
Natural Designs Nursery
Portland, Oregon
-----Original Message-----

Hi Isabelle,

I am your neighbor and can shed some light on your questions, maybe not
magic
answers but my experiences.

On dahlia's, many bloom in response to long, warm seasons.  A few to day
length.
absolutely forever to break gound in cold soil.  I grow only container
plants, less than 60 cm., and start in the utility room in my house.  When
through the soil, I put the pots in the unheated garden shed part of the
barn. off the floor, in a series of south windows and leave indoors until
the
middle of June.  It is cold in the mountains at night.  I get earlier bloom
this way.  The many flowered small sorts are the most reliable.

I have no liking for those huge dahlias so have no experience with them.
Mail order dahlia tubers are sometimes partly rotted as they are grown in
the
Netherlands and imported to us after some kind of phyto-sanitary treatment.
Be very careful what you plant and insist on a good sized tuber.  Return and
don't use small ones.  If you order three you usually get one big one and
two
not so big.  This practice is from good companies as well as those
considered
I have had as good luck from HD dahlias as from mail order companies.

Congratulations on the J. anemone from seed, very hard to accomplish.  Most

Another small advice is that those plants that take warm-cold-warm seed
treatment may never appear and you maybe growing something else entirely.
This happens to all seed lovers and is a great letdown when you have
nurtured
some weed for two years.


Claire Peplowski
NYS z4

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