Hello friends! We’re excited to introduce you to one of the newest members of our hybridizer family, Brent Opalek. Brent was part of our Novice Hybridizer Class of 2025, but his dahlia story began almost 20 years ago with a visit to Seattle, which eventually led to hundreds of plants, an ambitious plan to breed a blue dahlia that smelled like chocolate, and two special seedlings named for women in his family.
Brent Opalek
From Four Plants to Hundreds
Brent first fell in love with dahlias in 2006, when he saw them growing at Volunteer Park in Seattle. He was captivated by how varied and prolific they were, and when he moved back to Michigan in 2010 and couldn’t find many dahlias locally, he decided to grow his own.
Brent started with four plants. By the next year, those four had become 30, and by 2012 he was renting additional garden space so he could grow hundreds. The dahlias had officially taken hold.
Today Brent grows and hybridizes dahlias in Twin Lake, Michigan, but flowers aren’t his only seasonal pursuit. When the Michigan growing season winds down, Brent heads west to Colorado, where skiing is part of his winter rhythm. He trades summers filled with growing, evaluating, and dreaming about dahlias for winters in the mountains and snow.
A Paintbrush, a Big Idea, and a Little Bit of Luck
By 2019, growing dahlias wasn’t quite enough. Brent wanted to create them, and he started with an ambitious goal: he was going to breed the first blue dahlia that smelled like chocolate. 😊
To no one’s surprise, that particular flower has not appeared yet, but the experiment led somewhere pretty wonderful. In 2020, Brent began using a paintbrush to hand-pollinate selected blooms in his garden. Of the crosses he made, just one produced seed: a cross between ‘Café au lait’ and ‘Peaches n Cream.’
The following spring, he planted those seeds, and among the seedlings that bloomed were two that would become especially meaningful: B’s Paula Marie and B’s Winnie Vanderstelt.
Flowers That Carry His Family With Them
Both dahlias carry names from Brent’s family. B’s Paula Marie was named for Brent’s mother, Paula Marie Opalek, who passed away in August 2021, and B’s Winnie Vanderstelt honors his grandmother.
There is something we especially love about flowers named this way. A dahlia becomes more than a beautiful new introduction. It carries a person, a memory, and a piece of someone’s family story forward into gardens far beyond the one where it first bloomed.
B’s Paula Marie has proven to be beautiful in more than sentiment alone. In 2024, she became Brent’s first dahlia entered into competition, where she went on to earn several first-place finishes and special awards.
From a Backyard Seedling to an Award Winner
It’s a remarkable journey for a flower that began as one seed from one successful cross in Brent’s Michigan garden. We first met Brent and B’s Paula Marie through our Class of 2025 Novice Hybridizer Program, and it has been such a pleasure to watch this variety move from a promising new seedling into a dahlia we’re now able to grow, multiply, and share with gardeners on a much larger scale.
Sharing Brent’s Dahlias With You
One of our favorite parts of this work is getting to know the people behind the flowers. Every new dahlia carries years of curiosity, observation, patience, disappointment, surprise, and often a great deal of heart.
Brent’s story has all of those things: a chance encounter with dahlias in a Seattle park, a garden that grew from four plants to hundreds, a paintbrush and an improbable breeding dream, and ultimately two flowers carrying the names of women he loves.
We’re honored to help write the next chapter by growing and sharing Brent’s dahlias with gardeners across the country, and we’re so glad you get to know a little more about the person behind the B’s prefix as you grow them in your own garden.
(at left: B’s Paula Marie dahlia in center, surrounded by Cafe au lait, Silver Years, and Sweet Nathalie dahlias)
