Arch Crerar used to have a lawn beside his home in a Stoke retirement village, but now it’s filled with a kaleidoscope of dahlias, from giants the size of your face to spherical pompoms.
There isn’t a weed in sight and not even a flower past its best. It’s a garden of show flowers in most people’s books, which is why he will have flowers at the Brightwater Horticultural Society’s Summer Show in February, as he has done for the past umpteen years.
The 84-year-old used to sell dahlia flowers at the gate of his previous home in Stoke where most of the 1500 section was planted in dahlias.
When he moved into the Ernest Rutherford Retirement Village four years ago, he just had to transform his lawn into garden beds for the dahlias.
“You’ve got to try and keep active and the gardeners have given me a hand digging up a patch of lawn,” he says.
“Every day I’m pottering around between cups of tea and sitting on my backside!”
Horticulture has been a constant through life, beginning with tobacco crops in Dovedale and moving into growing flowers as a hobby, including daffodils and gladioli before concentrating solely on dahlias.
He’s “forever buying fish bark” and spends many months tending plants and blooms, followed by a winter digging up tubers, so is rarely short of work in the garden.
Lead gardener Jo Robinson has been a helping hand and a big fan of Arch’s dahlia garden, which she says brings a lot of joy to people.
Dahlias were becoming old fashioned, but recently he has noticed a younger generation enthused with the rainbow of colours and their different shapes and sizes.
“We had a whole lot of tubers for sale at the spring sale and they went like hotcakes.
“They’re popular again; everyone wants to grow dahlias. I imagine there will be quite a few first-time entries at the show.”
Arch was the society’s president for a decade and says the show has been going for more than a century. It was one of the reasons he wanted to keep it going when he was in the role.
“All of those people before me had put a lot of work into it. I owed them something.
“It’s very countrified and they make good scones!”
The summer flower show is being held in the Brightwater Hall on Saturday 8 February between 9am and 4pm.
