On Thursday I sent you out to put bulbs in the ground. On Friday evening I was on my knees weeding round a rose, which was not on the list, and I found something behind it I had not properly looked at since May.

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."

— Albert Camus

(7 min read)

Hello friends, Gary Stewart here.

Friday evening, the light going, and I was on my knees in front of Rose - Princess Anne pulling out the bindweed that has been quietly working its way up through her all summer. This is a job done by feel more than sight at that hour. You find the stem, follow it down, and try to get it out whole rather than snapping it off and leaving the root to have another go in a fortnight. My hands were cold. The knees of my trousers were wet through and I had stopped noticing.

And then, somewhere above and behind me, orange.

Not a flash of it. It had been there all week. I was simply, for the first time, at the right height and the right angle and in the right frame of mind to see it, and when I sat back on my heels and looked up there was a dahlia behind that rose carrying more blooms than I have seen on it in three years of growing it.

David Howard. Burnt orange, near copper in that light, sitting over foliage so dark it reads as black once the sun has gone.

I will be straight with you about the rest of it. I have supported Wolverhampton Wanderers since I was a boy, and there is a particular old gold that does something to me that I could not explain to you and would not try. I am 45 years old and I was sitting in the mud in my own garden being quietly moved by a colour I was taught to find meaningful when I was twelve. Make of that what you like. The plant did not care either way.

But underneath the pleasure was something I liked considerably less. Which is that David Howard has been doing this for about a week, in my garden, in front of nobody, and I only found it because I happened to be kneeling.

Where I put it, and what that cost me

Here is the first thing I got wrong, and it is a small stupid one.

David Howard is behind Princess Anne. The rose is a good four foot and upright and she is doing what a healthy David Austin does in September, which is fill her space completely. The dahlia is three foot at best. So from the path — from where I actually walk, thirty times a day, with a watering can or a bin bag or a child — the dahlia does not exist. You have to be at the side, or on the ground, or genuinely looking.

I did not plant it there as a mistake. I planted it there for the reason we all plant things where we plant them, which is that in April there was a gap and the gap was that size.

The plant has done everything asked of it. It came through the drought. It went through August without complaint while I was carrying water to things that turned out to matter less. It has set more flower this year than it ever has. And the only reason I know any of that is that the bindweed got into the rose.

Then there is Paso Doble Dancer, which is the other way round and more instructive.

If you do not grow it: it is a dinnerplate, salmon-pink fading to a peach-yellow heart, and the blooms come six to eight inches across, which is the size where people stop and say something. Every catalogue and every label will tell you to put a dahlia like that at the back of the border. Big plant, big flower, back of the border. It is sound advice. It is what I did this year.

It has done worse than last year, when it was in the middle.

I do not have a laboratory explanation for you and I am not going to invent one. What I can tell you is what changed. In the middle it had light coming at it from more than one side, air moving round it, and I walked past it several times a day and therefore fed it, deadheaded it, and noticed when it wanted something. At the back it has the fence behind it, the neighbours of the border crowding in at the front, and the simple fact that I stopped going over there.

Plants that you walk past do better. That is not horticulture, it is just true.

So the label was right about the plant and wrong about my garden, and the only way I found that out was by doing what the label said for one season and comparing.

They were not late

Now to the thing I have actually been circling all weekend, which is the word I have used about these dahlias for about two months.

Late.

I have said it in the garden. I have thought it while looking at three foot of healthy leaf with nothing on it. Halfway through August, walking past the bed on my way to water something else, I remember deciding — not dramatically, just deciding, the way you write something off without ceremony — that this was not going to be a dahlia year.

They were not late. I was impatient, and I had the wrong calendar in my head.

We think of dahlias as summer flowers because they arrive in the garden centre in summer, in flower, in a pot, at the point when we are buying. But a dahlia's own season runs from roughly the middle of summer to the first frost, and the back half of that is the better half. August, September, October. What I was calling late was in fact the middle of its year.

And there is a plain mechanical reason the big ones come last. A dahlia cannot make a flower until it has made a plant to hold it up. The tuber goes out in May with nothing above ground; everything you eventually see — every stem, every leaf, the whole structure — has to be manufactured first, from scratch, in one season. The larger the bloom, the more plant is required underneath it before that bloom is even possible. A dinnerplate is not slow. It is building.

Then add this summer to it. Heat and drought do not just wilt a plant, they stall it. A dahlia under water stress puts what it has into staying alive rather than into flowering, and it holds that position until conditions change. Which means the rain in late August was not the end of the dahlia season. It was the starting gun.

I spent July and August waiting for these plants to fail. They were not failing. They were assembling.

Nine months

It is worth saying out loud what these particular plants have cost, because I think it changes how the last few weeks read.

Last autumn I let the frost blacken them, cut them down, and lifted the tubers out of the clay. They went into pots and up to the allotment greenhouse, and they sat there through the whole of winter doing absolutely nothing, in the dark, in the cold, being checked occasionally by a man with a torch. In spring I started watering and feeding them in the greenhouse and they woke up. Late May they went out into the ground.

Nine months, near enough, from lifting to planting out. Then May to late August in the border with nothing to show for it.

And the return on all of that is what I saw on Friday, and it will run until the first proper frost — which in Norfolk is usually somewhere in the back half of October, sometimes not until November, and never when you have asked it to be.

Six weeks. Maybe eight if we are lucky.

Nine months of work for six weeks of flower, and I want to be careful here, because the obvious move is to call that a poor deal and then rescue it with something uplifting. I do not think it is a poor deal and I do not think it needs rescuing.

The six weeks are not what the nine months bought. The nine months bought the possibility of the six weeks. That is a different thing, and it is the thing almost everything worth doing is actually made of. You do not get the flower at the end of a queue for turning up. You get a plant in the ground, in September, with a frost date somewhere ahead of it that nobody has told you, and what happens in between is the whole of it.

I have written to you a lot this summer about work that pays out later. Bulbs that come up in March. Cuttings for a February I cannot forecast. A notebook full of things I meant to move.

This is the other side of that ledger. This is a September where something I did last October is standing in the border being orange at me.

What to do with them now

Practical, and quickly, because there is a fortnight of useful work in this.

Keep deadheading, and deadhead properly. This catches people out with dahlias more than any other plant, because a spent dahlia and an unopened bud look similar at a glance. The difference is shape. An unopened bud is round and fat and smooth. A finished one is pointed — conical, with the sepals curling back — and it is firm rather than soft. Learn that once and you will never mis-cut again. And when you take it, do not just snip the head off; follow the stem down to the next pair of leaves or to a main stem and cut there, or you leave a bare stub that looks like a mistake for the rest of the season.

Keep feeding. High potash, the same thing you give tomatoes, once a week while they are still flowering. They are producing under conditions they do not love and it is not the moment to stop.

Cut them for the house. Both Eveline and Mount Tacoma are cut-flower varieties — the white with the lavender edge, and the white semi-cactus with the pointed petals — and dahlias respond to cutting the way they respond to deadheading. The more you take, the more it makes. Bringing them indoors is not stealing from the garden. It is the same instruction by another route.

And do the thing I did not do last year. Take a label and a pencil down the border now, while the evidence is in front of you, and write where each one actually is and how it actually did. Not where you meant to put it. Where it is, and what happened. Paso Doble Dancer goes back to the middle next year. David Howard comes out from behind that rose. I know both of those things today and I will not know them in May, because in May all of this is a patch of bare clay and I am a man with a good memory for what he intended and a poor one for what he observed.

The tubers will come up in October or November, when the tops have gone black and slimy and it is properly unpleasant work. Cut down, lift, clean off, dry them, and back into the dark for another winter.

Which is not the end of it. That is just where next year is kept.

The Plant Was Not Late. I spent two months calling these dahlias late, and what I meant was that they were not doing it when I expected. A dinnerplate cannot flower until it has built the plant that holds the flower up, and this summer's drought stalled all of that by weeks. Before you write something off as failing, check whether it is simply working to a calendar you did not agree to.

You Find the Right Place by Getting It Wrong Once. Paso Doble Dancer went to the back of the border this year because that is what the label says to do with a big dahlia, and it has done less than the year it sat in the middle where I walked past it daily. The label was right about the plant and wrong about my garden. There is no way to know that in advance, and no shame in the season it took to find out — only in not writing it down while you can still see the proof.

Short Is Not the Same as Small. Nine months of lifting, storing, waking and planting, for six weeks of colour before the frost takes it. Put like that it sounds like a bad trade, and it is not one, because the nine months never bought the six weeks — they bought the chance of them. In October the tubers go back into the dark in a cold greenhouse and sit there doing nothing visible until spring. That is not the end of the show. That is where the next one is kept.

Gary Stewart writes twice a week from a small garden and an allotment on Norfolk clay.

Mondays are for what the garden has already done. Thursdays are shorter, because the weekend is the point and the reading is not.

No expertise, no ideal garden, just what the soil taught him that week.

Written slowly, at the speed of the garden.