Swan Island Dahlia Battle

This past weekend my mother paid us a visit. She loves to garden and spends countless hours each week working in her yard. The back yard is reserved for vegetables and berries but the front is where she grows her flowers. About a week after she moved in she dug up half her lawn to plant more flowers and her children called her crazy. “Who digs up their lawn?” we asked, pointing at the surrounding neighbor’s lawns. Of course it turned out looking beautiful and she has the whole neighborhood jealous.

Then, last year, she put up an 8-foot fence with thick wood posts and heavy gauge wire. It looks like the kind of barricade one would imagine surrounds Fort Knox. “It’s to keep the deer out,” she insists. “They keep eating all my flowers.” While this might be true, the fence has her children now convinced she’s crazy. She insists the neighbors are jealous of her fence as well but I’m not buying it.

Either way, my mother loves flowers and for the past four years or so has wanted to visit during the Swan Island Dahlia Festival. It’s the largest of its kind, at least in the U.S.; something one of my mother’s neighbors loves to remind her of. She’s a small, fast talking woman who likes to hold her own visit to the festival over my mother’s head. “So,” she might say, “it’s just too bad you didn’t make it out to the dahlia festival this year.” She bides her time, waiting till mid-September, knowing it’s too late for my mother to catch a quick spontaneous flight. “It’s such a shame too because it’s the largest one of it’s kind,” she’ll add as she walks away. “Acres and acres of the most beautiful dahlias you’ve ever seen.”

Well no more, miss neighbor of my mother’s. She’s been to the Swan Island Dahlia Festival and seen the ‘dinner plate’ section. She’s been in the creepy underground display cave and she’s walked the acres and acres of the most beautiful dahlias in the world.

Oh, and by the way, rumor has it this was the biggest most glorious show in the entire history of the Swan Island Dahlia Festival.