A favorite dark-leaved dahlia with fiery single blooms that pollinators love.
I don’t know about you, but it’s easier for me to do something every day than to maintain a habit on any other interval. Recycling every other week, is hit and miss. I wish I was better at birthdays. Don’t even get me started on paying my quarterly taxes.
Which is all to say, somehow I overlooked the fact that today is my day to post on GardenRant — preferably a wise, or at the very least observant, nugget about the garden and my role/responsibility (your role/responsibility?) in natural systems. Here’s a look into how my mind works. I first wrote the previous sentence to read “…my place (your place?) in nature.” It’s true, we do have a place in nature — we ARE nature — but the time has passed for us to think in a passive tense.
While tax days, birthdays and putting stuff out for the recycling service I pay extra for in order to keep my personal hard-to-recycle materials out of the waste stream often elude me, for 5 1/2 years I have posted every day on Instagram. Everyone marvels when I share that, but you brush your teeth every day, right? So, forgive me for publishing today’s IG post – frankly, it’s all I’m thinking about these days.
A smokey sunset over the Salish Sea is a terrible beauty.
Fire and smoke looks so much better on a dahlia than it does in the skies overhead.
Climate anxiety, and countless other environmentally-driven maladies are now a part of everyday life. But I can’t help thinking about the littles who don’t know otherwise. Or our elders who already struggle to keep up with a world that “moves fast and breaks things” — a demographic I’m fast approaching.
I know, and I’m sure you do too, people of all ages who fall into the “sensitive” category on the air quality app that I find myself constantly checking. Be safe my friends and take care of one another.
Smokey skies and orange shadows.
I wish I could say I knew the way forward. All I do know is opening my eyes and paying attention comes first. If there’s one thing we gardeners know in our bones, it’s that all conditions are local. Climate catastrophe may look very different where you live than where I reside. Constant rain and powerful storms are robbing us of far more than blight-free tomatoes. Drought-stricken regions are flooding.
It’s a lot. But, given that you’re already reading this page, I’d like to suggest making time to browse through, at the very least bookmark, past “Gardening on the Planet” posts here on GardenRant. Then share them with friend and family.
Boil it all down: No plants, No planet.
Thank you, Lorene. I’m grateful for your words
Thank you Christie, for your beautiful writing.
Good to get inspiration for nurture above and beyond gardening. After gardening for 40 yrs, I’m now in a space with no garden except a couple of pots, and some gifted orchids which I’m loving and hope to keep going but the nature I need is there in the back yard with trees, birds, crickets, and all other creatures of the outdoors. Dahlias were one of the flowers I grew and still love to see. This single dahlia has nice color; I will try to see if I can grow it in a pot.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us here!
This would be a great dahlia for a container — It’s not too big, the foliage is fab for contrast even before the blooms show up! Good luck~
What is the name of that dahlia?
Hi Susan,
Oh how I wish I could tell you the name of this dahlia~ I purchased it as a start in a 4” pot and have had it for a few years. The plants are modest — not one of those giants that has to be staked. Here in Seattle, I can leave the tubers in the ground, which is more successful than my (mis-placed) efforts to overwinter them indoors, which generally ends up in a messy goo.
Hey! I just googled dark leaf dahlia and came across the Mystic line, which is ringing a bell…
Looks like HS Date to me!
Thank you Lorene, I enjoyed your pithy and interesting post. We do need to help the planet survive in any way we can. Coincidentally, only today the gardener who helps in my garden was raving about rust coloured dahlias and talking about how much the bees love them.
Best wishes from the Chilterns in England.
Single dahlias are pollinator superheroes! I believe gardeners can be planetary superheroes~
thanks for these thoughtful words.
but, like Susan and others, would love to know the name of that dahlia- plant lust again…
To the best of my recollection, my plants are a part of the “Mystic” line of dark leafed dahlias. Great scale for containers and no-stake ease in the garden.
Amen to all you said. In our myriad of individual decisions, we make a difference each day in the life or destruction of our planet. There is hope, if we take action where we can. Keep calm and garden on!
Garden on indeed!