Dahlia Society of California<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe Dahlia Dell is unique among the gardens in Golden Gate Park. It’s not maintained by San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department staff.<\/p>\n
Plantings and maintenance is all done by volunteers like Dietz, who grows about 220 dahlia plants at the dell. There are about 700 in the garden.<\/p>\n
The Dahlia Dell has been around since the 1880s, when Golden Gate Park was created, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that the flower’s popularity exploded in San Francisco.<\/p>\n
“It turned into a bit of a rage. People were paying a lot of money for them, as much as $15 for a prized tuber in the 1920s,” said Eric Gensler, president of the Dahlia Society of California.<\/p>\n
$15 in 1920 is about $250 in today’s money.<\/p>\n
The dahlia mania started in Victorian times, after tubers were taken from its native Mexico to Europe, but the obsession in San Francisco was by the newly developed Sunset and Richmond neighborhoods, which were built on sand dunes.<\/p>\n
“It was hard to grow much of anything in these gardens, but it turns out dahlias love the sandy soil,” said Gensler.<\/p>\n
Neighbors banded together to grow them and enter the best ones at a competition held at the Palace Hotel.<\/p>\n
By 1926, the dahlia craze was so big that it was declared the official flower of San Francisco.<\/p>\n
After World War II, the Dahlia Dell was cared for by Roy Takeuchi after he returned from a concentration camp, where Japanese-American citizens were incarcerated.<\/p>\n
Takeuchi sold and planted dahlias for 40 years. When he became ill, Gensler and Dietz took over and decided to fill the garden with pedigree varieties.<\/p>\n
“Dahlias have attitude. They don’t look up at the sky, they don’t look down at the ground, they look right at the judges,” said Dietz.<\/p>\n
Antoinette Nascimento joined the Dahlia Society of California just a few months ago and now shares her enthusiasm by giving free tours of the dell every Saturday at noon.<\/p>\n
“I’m a diploid, you’re a diploid. These are octoploids, which means instead of having two sets of chromosomes, they have eight. That’s wild,” said Nascimento..<\/p>\n
Those eight sets of chromosomes allow for a large variety of flowers.<\/p>\n
“There’s 21 forms recognized by the Dahlia Society and different sizes within those forms.”<\/p>\n
Some are as big as a dinnerplate, others the size of a quarter.<\/p>\n
Dietz said the rainbow of colors is yet another connection to San Francisco.<\/p>\n
“Dahlias just have such infinite variety. We San Franciscans have infinite variety”<\/p>\n
The best dahlias from the dell and gardens in Northern California will be on display Saturday and Sunday at the annual dahlia show.<\/p>\n
The free event will be held at San Francisco County Fair Building<\/a> in Golden Gate Park on August 15 and 16.<\/p>\nCopyright \u00a9 2026 KGO-TV. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Deborah Dietz has been tending to the dahlia garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":432074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[171649,171646,171648,101,171645,103,102,104,106,105,171647],"class_list":["post-432073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-171649","tag-dahlia-society-of-california","tag-pedigree-dahlia-display","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-dahlia-dell","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-where-to-see-dahlias"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/432074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}