Dahlias flourish on Whidbey, adding late-summer color

They’re vibrant and perfectly rotund, and this time of year, can be found just about anywhere on Whidbey.

It’s peak dahlia season, and growers are delighting in their hard work that has yielded beautiful blooms. Whether they’re grown to be sold or for personal uses, the bouquets add a pleasing pop of color that’s difficult to resist.

In Langley, ongoing construction for a major infrastructure project hasn’t deterred people from pulling a U-turn and stopping by the Dahlia House on Fairgrounds Road. The little flower stand is bursting with the perennials, which are carefully curated by Tamara Knapp. She has been continuing the legacy of her grandparents’ farm.

“We have really good soil here because of a hundred years of cows and chickens,” Knapp said with a laugh. “Plus, it’s a little bit sandy so it drains really well.”

Back in 2015, Knapp barely knew what a dahlia was. She and her mother, Dorothy Anderson, dug up 120 tubers that year on a stormy November day from a former dahlia farm on Swede Hill Road in Clinton, saving what had been 30 years of hard work planted and replanted by a dahlia expert who had since retired.

Knapp soon found out there are thousands and thousands of varieties of the flower.

“And once I discovered that, all of a sudden it became kind of an addiction,” she said. “At one point we had 800 but that was too much to manage, so we cut back to 500.”

Every year, the dahlias must be dug up and divided, and the tubers are sold in the Dahlia House in the middle of April. The rest are replanted for the next season, blooming at the end of July and enduring well into October, only stopped by windstorms or early frost. They thrive in the late, hot summer months of the Pacific Northwest.

Knapp, who grew up on South Whidbey, keeps the Anderson family farm running with the help of her mother, her childhood best friend Denise Currier and farmer Gabbi Korrow.

“We could not create all this beauty and magic without this girl right here,” Knapp said of Korrow. “She is the foundation to this.”

Knapp’s grandparents, Mildred and Al Anderson, were all about giving back to the community, especially during the holiday season, when Mildred would bake hundreds of pounds of cookies and candy for the entire city of Langley to enjoy.

“This is our way of giving back,” Knapp said. “It’s certainly a labor of love, but it passes on joy and happiness and love to our community and that’s why we do what we do. When people drive up, to see their big smile on their face and pop out of their car – it’s really lovely.”

M&M Flowers, located off East Fakkema Road in Oak Harbor, boasts close to 4,000 dahlias. Started in 1982, the flower farm has been going strong for over the past four decades.

“It keeps me out of the bars and off the streets,” Dave Thomas quipped.

The operation was started by his two sons and continued today by him and his daughter. Thomas is a Master Gardener, a graduate of the Washington State University Extension program that educates people about gardening and environmental stewardship. There are over 80 certified Master Gardeners in Island County, according to the WSU Extension website.

Thomas surmised that dahlias do so well on Whidbey because there are very few insects to bother them, unlike other parts of the country. Apart from slugs, aphids, earwigs and thrips, he said, they are “pretty bulletproof.”

“They’re quite tolerant,” he said. “I’ve grown them in rocks. I guess heavy clay probably isn’t the best for them; otherwise, they’re kind of hard to kill.”

He agreed that the island’s glacial till also helps.

“They’re pretty, they last a long time and people love them,” he said.

And there are some who grow dahlias for other purposes. Tandy Scott, a Greenbank resident who is also a Master Gardener, brings vases of her blooms to the WhidbeyHealth Medical Center in Coupeville and Maple Ridge Assisted Living in Freeland. At the hospital, when people come for cancer treatment, diagnostic imaging and rehabilitation, Scott said, it just makes their day to see her dahlias.

Scott grows about 400 dahlias spread out across three different gardens in her yard. Her first tubers came from a Bayview Road flower farm that was giving them away for free in 2016. Now, she returns that favor by giving some of her tubers away for free every year.

She had the idea to start taking her bouquets to different places when she broke her back a few years ago.

“I found out when I came outside and started messing with them, I quit thinking about my pain,” she said. “And that’s when I just put a few of them in a vase, go out to the hospital and said, ‘Can I start leaving flowers?’”

Still looking for a flower stand? Here’s a list of many that are likely to sell dahlias.

Oak Harbor

M&M Flowers, 173 East Fakkema Road

Dragonfly Flower Farm, 1319 Polnell Road

Greenbank

Whidbey Island Dahlias, Greenbank Farm north parking lot, 765 Wonn Road

Freeland

Fivestone Flowers, 5442 Shore Meadow Road

Foggy Hill Farm, 5623 Double Bluff Road

Forget Me Not Farms, 5700 Double Bluff Road

Langley

Anderson Farm & Gardens – The Dahlia House, Fairgrounds Road (near intersection with Al Anderson Avenue)