TACOMA, Wash. — At Tacoma's Point Defiance Park, home of the largest dahlia trial garden in the nation, judges are inspecting, measuring and color coding potential medal winners sent in from all over the country.
"I always tell people it's like a dog show," said American Dahlia Society president Brad Freeman. "There's a confirmation in a dog show. We judge form, color, the stem, the foliage, the substance -things like that."
Winning a medal is a big deal. It takes a score of 85 out of 100 in three different trial gardens to earn one. Wayne Lobaugh of Chehalis seems to collect medals the way most of us collect spare change.
He lost count at 150.
'It's not about being good," Lobaugh said. "It's about being super crazy."
Lobaugh specializes in open centered dahlias. He has a website he uses to sell seeds and tubers. RaeAnn's Gemini is named for his daughter. The Lo Clara is named for his granddaughter and the Lo Redeye have all won multiple awards.
After his latest win, The American Dahlia Society declared Lobaugh a dahlia superstar.
"All of us who knew Wayne knew that he was a superstar," said Freeman. "He's a great guy and we enjoy calling him a friend."
Lobaugh says he doesn't take the "superstar" title seriously.
"We have a guy at the American Dahlia Society who's in charge of publicity," Lobaugh shrugged. "He's new to the position. And in a press release he called everybody who won a medal last year a superstar."
Lobaugh says the secret to his success is planting certain dahlias close to one another and hoping the breeze and the bees cross-pollinate.
"We never get what we're looking for," Lobaugh said. "We just get a surprise and like it."
"So it's an inexact science then," we asked.
"I would say there's no science at all. It's all luck."
Luck that begins with our long sunny summer days which are perfect for dahlias. Planted after Mother's Day dahlias bloom from late summer until the first freeze. Lobaugh will use fertilizer and slug bait, but no pesticides.
"Pesticides for me are a no no," Lobaugh said.
That's for the sake of the bees, who work sometimes too closely with dahlia growers.
"I get stung three times a year on average," Lobaugh said with a smile. "Our garden at home has just a shimmer over the top of it because of all the bees flying around."
That means even as Lobaugh spends a Saturday morning judging someone else's dahlias his next series of superstars are about to bloom back home.
The 2023 National Dahlia Show is this weekend in Portland. The 2024 show will be in Wenatchee and chaired by Lobaugh.
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