This Labor Day we piled into the car, along with our friend Bryan (check out his beautiful new photoblog, by the way) and went down to Sarah’s hometown of Canby to check out one of the cooler annual events in this area–the Swan Island Dahlia Festival. (Locals: Even though the festival is technically over, you can still visit the flowers for a few more weeks–actually, it’s kind of more fun when it’s not the official festival. If you go, the Canby Burgerville is one of the best. Just sayin’…) It’s simply acres and acres of dahlias of all sizes, shapes and colors–it’s a real visual treat.
If we had been smart, we would have grabbed the handy sheet they had available and made a note of the really fabulous ones, since we’re definitely going to plant a few at our new house (more on that in a future post). But, we didn’t do that until we were leaving–whoops.
Our favorites are the reds–red translates in dahlias in more wonderful shades than any other flower. This one is a fabulous medium-size dahlia that has flowers that are almost spherical, and the individual petals are shaped like cones that collect water. How cool is that?
We also saw lots of happy bees. Not all bees are happy, you know. Bryan totally geeked out, which happens when you put a former environmental educator in a field of flowers. We’re pretty sure that Bryan was as excited about the bugs as the flowers…
Bryan is totally taking bug pictures in this photo.
Have you ever seen a dahlia that looks like this? We sure hadn’t. It looks almost like a sea creature, a starfish maybe…
How bad-ass is this two-tone dahlia? It’s bright red on top, pale yellow on the underside. Wow.
So this one’s called “Rip City.” It’s red and black. Yep…
We had a great time–even though we had some nasty food at a place that used to have pretty good pie and decent hash browns… We also tried to go to the cool architectural salvage place in Aurora (it was closed) and had a great time at St. Josef’s Winery (the winery is right behind Sarah’s mom’s house). You can see more of our photos of our day in this Flickr photoset.
But since we’re talking about gardening, we thought this would be the perfect time to mention that Sarah’s mom has started a nifty new gardening blog! She’s done all the work on it herself, and is still learning how to work with Wordpress, but it’s looking good. Check it out if you’re a plant geek.
~S & J
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Great post, and great photos. And a great time… One of the things I was thinking about all night, when I couldn’t sleep, was what I was about the post I’m looking forward to making with all the photos I took when I was geeking out with you both and Sandra.
Thanks for the great time!
Bryan
Wow. That dahlia is all kinds of beautiful and the photography is amazing.