The Difference Between Dahlia Seeds and Dahlia Tubers

We love dahlias here at Triple Wren, and we sell their tubers (storage roots) to our flower-loving customers so they too can plant them and grow the flowers we grow here at the farm. It is so delightful to us to think about how the “babies” and “grand-babies” of our beloved flowers are growing in gardens all throughout the United States!

Have you ever thought about how those dahlia varieties first grew? Have you wondered how their first tubers were created, or why dahlias make flowers/seeds at all since they’re so easily multiplied via their roots?

Well first of all, it helps to keep in mind that almost every plant you see growing in the world around you is trying to accomplish one main thing: its goal is to reproduce itself. Whether by spreading rhizomes, waving burr-covered seed pods around until they stick to your pants or an animal’s fur, attracting birds to eat their delicious fruit and “drop” their seeds everywhere birds “go,” creating abundant tubers to clone itself, attracting forgetful squirrels to plant nuts, or any number of creative methods, plants are reproducing all around us. 

Most plants have multiple ways of reproducing themselves, and it is fairly easy to multiply many plants by air-layering roots, taking herbaceous cuttings, or dividing the plants.

The dahlias we commonly cultivate in gardens today naturally reproduce in two ways:

• They produce abundant flowers that (when pollinated and properly ripened) make beautiful seeds, and 
• they also produce abundant tubers when grown well.

There is one major difference in these two methods, however. The tubers will produce clones/copies of their “mother” plants, but the seeds will not. 

Dahlia seeds can produce an amazingly diverse collection of unique blooms. The new seeds are hybrids of their seed-parent (simply put, their mother) and the plant whose pollen was carried to the mother (simply put, their father). The different seeds on a dahlia seed-head can have many different “fathers,” so each seed from the head can look wildly different. Since dahlias have more chromosomes than most other flowers, the sky’s the limit in the “lottery” of what can happen.

There are some ways to influence the results of hybridization, and learning how different successful hybridizers approach their work is really fascinating!

At Triple Wren, our dahlia seeds are pollinated by the bees and other pollinators who enjoy the blooms and benefit from their pollen and nectar, and we love saving them and growing thousands of them out. We’re always on the lookout for special “keeper” varieties, but we also simply enjoy the beauty of rows of random, unexpected beauty, and the thrill of knowing we are growing varieties that don’t exist anywhere else in the whole, wide world. 

Dahlia plants grown from seeds produce a small clump of tubers in their very first year of growing, and if you want to grow a seed-planted variety in future years, you can dig up and save the new clump overwinter with your other tubers, and plant it again the following spring. At Triple Wren, we choose to save the intact clump of any first-year varieties that we choose to grow on, and replant the entire clump the following spring. After the second year of growth, we judge the tubers to be strong enough to divide in the traditional way, and would choose to keep reproducing the variety if the genetics of the seedling are stable, and if the plant and tuber are healthy.