Gratuitous Beauty

We must endeavour to invest just as much energy in beauty as we invest in anything else in our lives.

I waited all summer for my Dahlias. I planted them last April in large plant pots which I would bring inside without fail every evening to keep them warm, and bring back out again to get the morning sun. I watered them and cared for them for months. When they were big enough I planted them outside.

Each night before bed I would go on slug-patrol. An exercise my cat found very curious and stupid. Why pick them off and throw them to the back of the garden when they would only return? My silly dog just got excited on these late night jaunts as he thought I was hunting snacks for him. I never gave him any, but he got excited all the same.

And the summer went on, and the green leafy vegetation grew, but no flowers. Not even a bud! A friend I had shared some tubers with sent me a lament that hers had not bloomed, and was relieved, albeit momentarily, to discover that mine had not bloomed either. We both had a bit of a rant and felt better, but not that much better.

My blooms were sparce, and not in proportion to the leaves and stalks. It was a very strange year for flowers. I went to the Botanic Gardens to see how their Dahlias were faring, and you can see from the last photograph, some of their plants did not bloom well either, even though those that did were fabulous. I felt not so much a hopeless gardener after all.

National Botanic Gardens Dahlias

Dahlias bloom in late June and I got my first flower in September. Now it’s October - mid-October, and my 2 dinner-plate Dahlias that are left are going to be ravaged by rain and wind. They already survived one storm, I feel blessed by that, but they are not designed for difficult weather. They grow tall with precarious hollow stems, and their flowers are whorls of such delight indeed, yet they capture and hold onto all the raindrops. Drenched flowers become top-heavy. They keel over. Their necks break.

I thought I’d not see any flowers in my garden at all this year, but the past week or two in Dublin has been beautiful, warm and sunny. Today my remaining 2 dinner plates are just splendid. This is their best day of the summer, ironically, in mid-October. So I thought, why not take lots of photographs and post them here. A marker of this year - it was not a total disaster. We can lament or celebrate together and create a bittersweet symphony in the comments. I have had my flowers now. I captured the moments. And now I can let it go.

My dinner plate dahlias

Dinner-plate Dahlias. The white is a Café au Lait, and the pink is a Penhill Monarch. And yes, that’s me in the last photo - for scale of course - me looking tired but here and still positive nonetheless. Even with all the collapse around us, beauty is still here. It was worth the effort.