I live in Northwest Montana, at 3000 feet, in the Rocky Mountains. It’s been a long warm summer, and two weeks ago I noticed a plant growning near our lawn.
I’ve left it alone and now it has blossomed into a very pretty yellowish/orange flower. I checked my copy of “Plants of the Rocky Mountains” and can’t seem to find a good match. Any ideas?
JoeyP is right it is absolutely a dahlia, and not a wild one, either.
Yep. Definitely looks like a dahlia to me. It’s not in Plants of the Rocky Mountains because it’s not native to this area (I’m in Montana, too).
If it was a dahlia, that would mean either dolphinboy has just moved into his house, or been, ahem, unobservant as these grow from a bulb or tuber, so it couldn’t be a “volunteer” that grew from a seed that a bird dropped. Also, it wouldn’t be able to overwinter in the ground in Montana.
However, I agree that it doesn’t look like a wildflower. Maybe take a walk around the neighborhood and see if you see any in a nearby garden?
Dahlias can be grown from seed, so this could be a random seedling. Dahlia plants grown from tubers normally have more leafy growth than this, so I’d say its either a first year seedling or maybe a remnant of a tuber that somehow escaped the winter frost. They are frost tender, but exceptional microclimates sometimes allow them to scrape through.
Really? Huh. Could it make it this far in the short what passes for summer in Montana?
Not absolutely sure for that locality, but they’re definitely grown from seed (amongst other things, that’s how new varieties are raised) - and they can produce flowers in their first year (here’s a page about growing them from seed).
Another possibility is squirrels* - they will unearth, eat, move and rebury dahlia tubers.
(*or racoons, chipmunks, badgers, etc, as may or may not be locally available)
Mystery solved. My wife had bought some bulbs last year from a friend’s kid who was selling them to raise funds for her school. She planted a few just to see what would happen. They were supposed to be deer resistant, and so far that seems to be the case. I assume these are annuals, especially given our long hard winters. We’ll see what happens next summer.
BTW, the summers here are quite nice with temps in the 70’s and 80’s from June through much of September. In fact, we are expecting another warm patch next week with temps in the mid 80’s F.
Since we are fairly northern we get long summer days that can last 15 hours in July, so gardening is possible here. We grow tomatoes, a few varieties of squash, lettuce, onions, peppers, carrots and radishes pretty easily. It’s the amazing summers, along with the abundant wildlife, that make living up here here worth while.
If you can dig them up after the growth dies down and store them in bags or boxes of sand in a cool but frost-free place (basement, garage, etc), you can plant the tubers out again in the spring and carry them over that way. Otherwise, yes, they’ll probably die over the winter, especially if you get bad ones (I came in to edit that to “bad winters” so it wasn’t ambiguous, but “bad tubers” would be pretty much the same result).