Stuff Magazines

EDITORIAL

- Jo McCarroll on the heroes of our dahlia seed giveaway.

Jo McCarroll

Some of you might still be waiting for the flowers, I know. Dahlias are normally in bloom this month of course but it took a bit longer to send the seed out than we anticipated, so there might be some delay. The free seed was very generously given to me by a good friend of NZ Gardener, the Auckland-based plant breeder Dr Keith Hammett, in exchange for two jars of my homemade marmalade (‘Seville’ and whiskey, and lime with lime leaf infusion, just for background). It was, as I wrote in the July issue last year, the excess seed from his own dahlia breeding programme: from the F2, or second generation, where you see the qualities of the parent plants combined in new ways for the first time. Readers who availed themselves of the offer would be able to grow on a cross that had not been seen before, and, if they liked it, grow it on for a few more generations to potentially fix a brand new cultivar (we did something similar, also thanks to Keith’s generosity, with his sweet pea seed in 2020).

So last July we called on readers to send a stamped self-addressed envelope into our offices and about 7000 of you did. Our plan was to send out the seed over August. The seed comes to us from Keith loose in a large brown paper bag, so there’s a very manual process where you spoon a teaspoon of seed into a paper envelope and then put that in the SSAE and seal. It’s quite laborious, but with similar seed send outs, the whole team pitches in and we call in favours from everyone in our office and we can get it done with a few sessions over a few weeks.

August rolled around and the seed send out started. Stuffing 7000 envelopes is a massive job, as you can imagine, but many hands make light work and the seed was fair rolling out the door. We were already looking forward to seeing pictures of the flowers you grew.

Nek minnit, as the kids say.

You may recall that a couple of weeks into

August last year the whole country went into a level 4 lockdown. With barely a few hours notice, one of our wonderful reception staff, Shinea Campbell, had the presence of mind to take home a heap of envelopes and seed. She thought it was something she might chip away at, in the event that this lockdown went on for a week or two. (Please imagine me interjecting with a loud and hollow “ha!” at this point).

The NZ Gardener office is in Auckland. So it turns out we were at level 4 for the next five weeks; and in fact ended up working from home for the whole rest of the year.

So working by herself and from home, Shinea – in the copious downtime she had around doing her own job and homeschooling her two primary school kids – spooned out several thousand teaspoons of seed and sent out several thousand envelopes. She made such progress that she ran out of seed, and I had to contactlessly deliver some more.

A few months passed. Eventually NZ Gardener’s editorial assistant Barbara Smith took over, contactlessly collecting all the remaining seed and envelopes from Shinea. Barbara set up a solo seed sending station on her dining room table, and chipped away at the slowly diminishing envelope mountain in the evenings (get a good audio book, is her pro tip). Eventually in mid-December, it was done.

So I hope you are enjoying the flowers. Send pics of your favourite blooms to mailbox@nzgardener.co.nz and I’ll run a selection in an upcoming issue. If your seed came late, never fear… Keith told me he’s had autumn blooms from dahlias started from seed as late as January.

But I just wanted you to know a little bit about the incredible effort that went on behind the scenes to get that seed sent out. I hope it makes the blooms seem extra lovely to you to think that it is only growing because of such love and care. And Happy New Year to you all from the whole

NZ Gardener team!

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2022-01-01T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-01T08:00:00.0000000Z

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