You know you’re on to something pretty special when no less than five people recommend the same garden as a superb specimen to feature for the Lifestyles section of The Taos News.
That garden belongs to Tricia and Eric Stammberger, just off Rio Lucero near Upper Ranchitos. People in the know, and universities and garden groups come from miles around, even from out-of-state to revel in the Stammbergers’ little patch of dahlia heaven.
The day before our first hard frost of 2013, Friday, Sept. 27, Tricia Stammberger said the patio and gardens were full to overflowing with people who hurried by to clip and carry away as many of the dahlia blooms as they could handle.
We’re talking hundreds, between 750 to a thousand blooms Tricia guesstimates. Frequent visitors every year include the Lions Club, Southern Methodist University-Taos, The Native Plant Society, Oklahoma State University, art classes and individual painters, to name just a few.
“Friends and friends of friends came all day before the big frost Saturday morning, it was such chaos,” Tricia said, smiling wanly, but happily.
Even though the frost snapped all the dahlias and other tender annuals, big spots of blue bachelor buttons (cornflowers), purple cone flower (pink echinacea) and a riot of yellow gloriosa daisies still popped the air, bright under the fall skies.
But it’s the dahlias that delight.
“When you dig these up you divide them,” Tricia Stammberger says, a little hesitant because most gardeners won’t bother with digging and dividing, it’s just too much work.
But she’s got help — Jerry Schwartz’ Sticks Stones of El Rito, and his landscaping crew of seven.
“Jerry’s just a godsend,” she said, including of course every one of the workers. “When I first brought him in five years ago I just wanted him to tell me what would be good to grow here.” Shwartz stayed to design and plant and has been there ever since.
“When we do something, we don’t want it to be ordinary,” Tricia says about her and husband Eric’s approach to making a beautiful life.
A typical example is the concrete basketball pad they inherited from the former owners. While Tricia was noodling around with different ideas or removing it entirely, Eric Stammberger painted it into a checkerboard and installed large gray and white checker disks — totally fun and whimsical.
A frequent architectural detail throughout are branches, twigs and old tree trunks that serve variously as fence posts, trellises in the veggie garden or for clematis climbing against the barn, or slung diagonally across the front portal to support a huge mass of Virginia creeper vine.
Nothing goes to waste. If it’s not repurposed creatively it goes on the huge compost pile, easily as high as Tricia is tall (over five feet).
“We’ll have to get a backhoe in here to turn the compost this year,” she notes, eyeing the massive pile of green and brown compostables. It all goes back onto the beds and into the ground as nature intended.
“Dahlias don’t need rich top soil,” she explains, noting that this was one of the things Schwartz taught her. They don’t need lots of fertilizer to get this annual bounty, which is a good thing. The rocky river bed the property sits on isn’t lush, so the tons of top soil they brought in is all they have to work with – and the dahlias love it.
“Dahlias were first farmed by the Aztecs as a food. It’s a tuber, like a sweet potato,” Tricia said, something she discovered doing research for one of the many garden talks she gives throughout the year.
When asked if they’ve ever eaten one, her eyes fly open in horror.
“For us that would be cannibalistic! We can’t eat something once we know its name.”
Almost like they are pets? She agrees, shaking her head, smiling.
Here and there the dahlias are marked with different colored tape. That’s to help the gardeners decide which to divide and save, Tricia says, identifying which varieties she wants more of and which they have enough of — the workers specifically asked her to make selections this year to help keep the work down to a gentle roar.
With about 16 major varieties of dahlias planted, the show starts around Aug. 1 and, “goes like popcorn,” she says, ’til first frost. “We wait like little beavers for the first blooms and then they just keep coming. The more you cut the more they bloom.”
And it’s all a labor of love. The Stammbergers say it could never become a commercial venture, because it would lose the heart and soul that generates all this abundance in the first place.
Can’t wait for next August.
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