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Dahlias dazzle and delight

Gordon Stach is a competitive dahlia grower. He’s not interested in growing flowers just to create a pretty garden. He grows dahlias to win ribbons and trophies. And that means he has to grow them to be as perfect as possible.

Gordon Stach is a competitive dahlia grower. He’s not interested in growing flowers just to create a pretty garden. He grows dahlias to win ribbons and trophies. And that means he has to grow them to be as perfect as possible.

At his one-acre property in Surrey, he has more than 1,000 dahlia plants, neatly arranged in long rows as you would grow vegetables. The plants are “hilled” with soil pulled up around the base into low mounds the way potatoes are grown.

Each plant has its own wooden stake, attached to which is a white plastic label giving the flower’s name, size and category. When the sun gets too intense, when there’s not a cloud in the sky from morning till night, Stach brings out umbrellas to protect blooms from having their colours bleached away.

“In the U.K., they use paper bags, but I don’t have the patience for that,” he says. “I put up umbrellas and fasten them using duct tape. It works very well.”

Every morning, he walks his rows of dahlias to check for earwigs, one of the flower’s most persistent enemies, capable of nibbling petals into tatters.

Fortunately, earwigs are gregarious creatures that like to gather in colonies, coming together at dawn after a night of roaming and ravaging.

Stach always finds them hiding, huddled together under the labels he has stapled to the wooden stakes.

A gentle squish of his thumb is all it takes and they are gone. But not forever. They always come back in numbers.

After dealing with earwigs, Stach tackles enemy No. 2 — thrips, tiny winged insects that are especially destructive in light-coloured flowers, particularly whites and yellows.

Stach takes blooms he suspects of being infected between his hands, holding each flower gently like a sacred offering, and breathes warm air into the petals.

This forces the tiny bugs out into the open. They scurry to the edges of the petals, where they are easily visible for a second before they disappear back into the flower.

“I usually sacrifice the flower by cutting it and dropping it into a bucket of hot water. I know that 10 days later, I am going to get new blooms.”

Stach refuses to spray with systemic pesticide, something top dahlia growers in Europe still do to deal with thrips.

“It’s always a hit-and-miss affair, but I feel I have done well over the years, so I see no reason to use sprays.”

All this time and effort is invested to produce a few vases of perfect dahlias for judging at shows in August and September.

A member of both the Vancouver Dahlia Society and the South Fraser Valley Dahlia Club, Stach will exhibit the best of his blooms at competitive shows put on by both groups.

He hopes to win ribbons — blue ribbons for first place, green for best in category, yellow for section champion.

But his dream is always the same … to make it to the “head table” and maybe even win the multi-coloured, super-sized ribbon for best bloom in show.

“You can cheat a little, you know,” he says with a sly smile. “You can remove a damaged petal here or there and no one will notice. But if you take off one petal too many, you risk ruining the whole flower.”

“You can’t leave ugly gaps. Each bloom has to have a perfect shape, with not too many or too few petals.”

For competitive flower growers like Stach, winning a ribbon is everything.

He recognizes and delights in the beauty of each flower. As he walks in his garden, he is forever saying “look how beautiful that is” or “isn’t that terrific?”.

But his motivation is primarily to grow flowers to perfection or as near to it as he can get.

You may smile, but the nature of dahlia competitions, which many now regard as an old-fashioned and dying art form, is often far from friendly. Rivalry can be fierce, even unforgiving.

Stach has been a judge at dozens of shows himself. He considers himself one of the better, kinder evaluators of perfection.

“I judge the flower, not the person. I think that makes me a good judge. If the flower doesn’t warrant it, I won’t pass it.”

However, he is not quite so philosophical when it comes to errors in judgment on his own entries.

Once, a judge complained that he could not see one of Stach’s submissions properly — a perfectly arranged vase of three exquisite flowers.

The judge picked up the vase and carried it unceremoniously outside to study the blooms in broad daylight.

In the process, he knocked all the carefully arranged flowers out of kilter, and then announced, “I cannot judge these, look at how they are arranged.”

Stach was irritated by what he regarded as a witless attempt to put him out of the contest. He demanded a recount, even if it meant paying an extra $25 to have it done, but was ultimately denied. Years later, the frustration of the moment still rankles.

There have been compensations. Over the years, Stach has won more times than he has lost.

His basement is full of prize ribbons — firsts, best in class, best in show — all testifying to his exceptional skills and dedication as a passionate dahlia grower.

His enthusiasm for competition, even now when he is in his 80s, has not diminished, despite the demanding physicality of looking after hundreds of plants.

He gets help from his son, David, but tubers still have to be lifted and stored each fall and planted in mid-April and plants watered and fed and diligently watched over throughout summer.

To get the best blooms, Stach is a fastidious “disbudder.” This technique involves the careful removal of smaller side-buds on plants to allow more energy to flow to a few choice buds at the top to produce big, beefier, more impressive prize-winning blooms.

It’s a slow and laborious process. Disbudding half a dozen plants would be enough for most hobbyists, but times that workload by a hundred and you get an idea of the arduous nature of Stach’s commitment.

At first glance, from a distance, there appears to be nothing special about Stach’s garden. Without the disbudding, there would be countless flowers, but with buds removed, the flower impact has been significantly reduced.

Yet once you get closer and step deep into the dahlia rows, you quickly realize how rare and unusual the flowers on display are. The colours are amazing. There are deep purples, bright yellows, scintillating bi-colours, spectacular red-and-white striped ones and eye-catching purple rosette-shaped ones with yellow centres. Some of the flowers, especially the massive 25- to 30-centimetre dinner plate dahlias, produce an explosion of colour, some with exotic yellow, red and peach tones.

In the world of dahlias, there are names for each style of bloom, usually describing the distinctive look of each type, such as cactus, water lily, anemone, pompon and peony. Stach has his favourites in each category.

At the moment, he is most excited about a new black orchid-type called ‘Verrone’s Obsidian’, bred by a top hybridizer in Washington State.

Stach has quite a few hybrids to his own credit — he has produced more than 50 named varieties, some of which have become popular with dahlia lovers in other countries, especially the U.S., Germany and Britain.

Some of his winners include ‘Sour Grapes’ (deep purple), ‘Merrygold’ (yellow-orange) and ‘Professor Plum’ (purple).

His cream of the crop, he says, is ‘Amethyst Glow’ (deep pink).

In spring, Stach takes 10,000 of his tubers to sell at sales run by dahlia societies in the Lower Mainland and Nanaimo. He gives 50 per cent of his takings back to the clubs, boosting their funds by thousands of dollars.

“When I go over to Nanaimo, it costs me ferry and sometimes overnight hotel, so I barely break even, but it’s all fun. This is not a business, it is my hobby.”

— Steve Whysall is the garden columnist for the Vancouver Sun.