A grey day in Clive seems brighter when you step into Natalie Tolchard's dahlia field.
"The ladies do tend to swoon when they go down the rows," she laughs.
Country Life visited The Dahlia Field in Hawke's Bay in late autumn as Natalie was coming to the end of another busy season.
Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
Through a gate we go, past a shed full of tubers in old bread crates, mounds of compost, rolls of netting and stakes.
Round the corner and there they are ... rows and rows of brightly coloured blooms. It's as if there's a party going on.
Pompoms in an elegant shade of magenta, a show-off in candy-cane cream and red and a big and blousy salmon pink stealing the show.
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Natalie admits to "privately swooning herself" around her dahlias which she has been growing to sell to florists and at farmers' markets.
She also holds workshops, gives tours of her dahlia farm and sells cuttings and tubers to other dahlia growers.
Natalie trained as a teacher, worked in health and safety and also as a digger driver but had not given much thought to horticulture.
She spent a year or two researching dahlias after deciding sheep and trees weren't going to work on the 7000 square metre section she had bought with her husband Zolton.
Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
Apart from being smitten by the dahlia's range of colour and form, she saw there was quite a bit of money to be made from the flowers in the first year. That was four years ago.
"Then I became addicted and now I have to make money to satisfy my addiction," she told Country Life with a smile.
Natalie now has 130 varieties growing in two 16-metre beds and 250 more plants quarantined in buckets.
She likes to reuse and upcycle items, like the old bread crates, in an effort to reduce her carbon footprint and she is practising hugelkultur in the dahlia beds - building soil from logs and green waste.
Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
The trend for dahlias is "chronic" at the moment she says. She has to have a strategy to beat the rush when sales of the plants open up online as there is so much demand.
Her husband has also been seduced by the dahlia's charms.
"He bought in really badly so we're both addicted now!"
The Tolchards would like to convert a bus for people to stay a night among the dahlias.
And in difficult times, a stroll through her flowers can be a great tonic, she says.
"A lot of times we have a lot of chitchat going on in our heads ... flowers take you away from that and they keep you rooted in the now."
"They're a way to recalibrate your happiness meter."
Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
