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DAHLIAS FOREVER

- The dahlia bug can bite at any age, as one 12-year-old junior gardener dreams big.

STORY: CLAIRE FINLAYSON

There’d be few tween Christmas wishlists with this sort of relentlessly green slant: a garden voucher (to buy dogwood or lemon myrtle), a rose, a magnolia plant, a Bulbs Direct voucher, a rhododendron, an asparagus crown, and The Abundant Garden by Niva and Yotam Kay. The author of that 2021 list: Ed Malcolm-Tait, a 12-year-old Wellingtonian with a galloping dahlia obsession and a tendency to impulsebuy more seeds than he has soil for.

Ed fell dahlia-wards at the age of 10 when his Wadestown School teacher gave each student a dahlia seedling to grow. He had been mortified when it bowed its autumnal head. “I cried. I felt like I’d lost my best friend. I bought another one to keep it company. That was the moment I became addicted to flower gardening,” he recalls.

“I then went online and impulse-bought eight more tubers along with some gladioli. Slowly, the collection of pots on the deck started creeping down the stairs and on to the driveway. Every time I went to the garden centre, I would come back laden with packets of seeds I had not intended to buy. Two years later, I have 32 dahlias and the huge problem of where to put them.”

Ed has a tab on his phone for Bulbs Direct so he can keep track of flower availability. “Whenever Mum and Dad say ‘no more’ I just laugh.”

Procuring coveted dahlias has become a high stakes, jeopardy-taut pursuit for Ed’s mum, Suze Malcolm. She explains: “It’s like trying to get tickets to a Beyonce concert. We had some ‘Cafe au Lait’ drama last July.

It was top of Ed’s birthday list but by the time I got myself sorted, it had sold out. Thankfully I was rescued by a very kind soul on a dahlia Facebook group who said she could package one up and send it out. I felt like I was buying drugs.”

Dahlias are Ed’s top priority, but he also grows gladioli, lilies and sunflowers, with roses and ranunculus firmly in his sights.

He’s partial to vege growing too. The quest for the perfect carrot has proved to be long and vexatious. “I planted some New World Little Garden seeds in the vege beds, and then eagerly pulled them out after 10 weeks,” he says. “I didn’t know that you were supposed to thin carrot seedlings and to my dismay, I had produced 20 sad, 2cm-long carrots. I lapsed into a ‘plant depression’ which was only cured when my sunflowers bloomed a couple of weeks later.”

Dahlias are Ed Malcolm-Tait’s top priority, but he also grows gladioli, lilies and sunflowers, with roses and ranunculus firmly in his sights.

Clockwise from top left: This bloom is a mystery. Ed blames his mum for not clocking its name at the time of purchase; ‘Golden Torch’; ‘Jowey Chantal’; ‘Isadora’.

Determined not to be outwitted by a humble root vege, he consulted several books and his stack of NZ Gardener magazines (he’s subscribed since his 10th birthday) for carroty clues. Tenacity, extra soil care and an absence of harvesting haste on his fifth attempt gave the longawaited dopamine hit. “When I pulled out my most recent carrots I felt really happy for the rest of the afternoon. What I love most about gardening is that you’re literally growing life. It’s great to look at something and think, ‘This wouldn’t have been alive if it hadn’t been for me.’”

With both flowers and veges on the go (and older sister Sylvie colonising space for her leafy greens), the battle for space has been gathering momentum in the Malcolm-Tait corner of the world. “Unfortunately, as most of my family are into gardening, we’ve had to divide the big vege bed behind the house into thirds. Occasionally, someone will try to get extra territory by planting things inside my third. This has left me with a small metre square.”

Suze says garden encroachment is an ongoing filial battle in their house: “It’s a constant struggle. I’m literally sidelined into ever-smaller spaces.”

Then there’s the lawn. When granddad last visited and offered to mow the grass, Ed voiced his disapproval. “I said, ‘Could you not? We’re trying to grow the lawn long to encourage beneficial insects. He asked me to help him with the lawnmower and I said no.”

Future lawn fracas has since been thwarted. Parental resolve has weakened and plans are afoot to liberate the entire lawn along with a third of the driveway to free up more growing space. “We could sell the lawnmower and buy wildflower seeds to sow on the lawn,” Ed suggests.

This increased garden girth will be a boon to Ed’s dahlia plans. After reading Discovering Dahlias by Floret Farm’s Erin Benzakein over Christmas, he was in a hurry to begin hybridising adventures “before the bees got too involved”.

His plan: “I wanted to get the pollen from ‘Lavender Perfection’ and put it on ‘Cafe au Lait’. Both are dinner plate varieties so if I breed them together, they might produce another dinner plate, and I’m hoping the colours will mix well. One is purple-ish and one is pale peach so I’m hoping for a pinkish purple.”

Unfortunately, in her well-meaning bid to solicit more growth from her son’s ‘Lavender Perfection’, Suze deadheaded the very dahlia noggin Ed was saving for breeding. The wait for the next bud is now on – and maternal deadheading duties have been duly suspended.

Holidays are greeted with a mix of delight and despair. On a recent road trip, Ed insisted one of his favourite dahlias come along for the ride. ‘Lavender Perfection’ sat, adventure-ready, in a vase between the two front seats.

Indeed, gardener separation anxiety has dampened many a holiday mood. “When we left on a recent trip, I had a new bud on my first dahlia plant of the season and was really annoyed because it meant I’d miss the flowering,” he says.

“There’s always trepidation when we return from holiday,” Suze adds. “The first thing the kids do is leap out of the car and find out whether anything in the garden has died. Darkness descends if there has been a death while we’ve been away.”

Ed’s future is looking bloom-certain. Dennis Rodgers (President of the National Dahlia Society of New Zealand) got wind of Ed’s vacationing ‘Lavender Perfection’ and invited him to the next Dahlia Day in Fielding. Creating a show-stopping bloom good enough to make the national dahlia register is another goal. “It would be so cool to go to someone’s garden and see a variety that you invented.” And ultimately, he’d like to own a lifestyle block full of Ed-engineered dahlias and be as bloom-savvy as plant breeder Dr Keith Hammett or Erin Benzakein. Of the latter’s dahlia farm in Washington in the US, Ed says: “It looks amazing. That would be the dream life. Once you’ve been bitten by the dahlia bug you can’t stop.”

Or, as his favourite gardening T-shirt reads: I think I have enough dahlias, said no dahlia lover ever.

On a recent road trip, Ed insisted one of his favourite dahlias come along for the ride. ‘Lavender Perfection’ sat, adventure-ready, in a vase between the two front seats.

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