Grown by volunteers, loved by Gloucester: the Boulevard's dahlias go home with you Saturday

All summer, Generous Gardeners volunteers tended the dahlias that line Stacy Boulevard. This weekend those blooms go home with Gloucester residents, and the volunteers spent Friday getting ready.

The group holds its annual cut dahlia sale Saturday, Oct. 3, starting at 10 a.m. on Stacy Boulevard near the tennis courts. Volunteers cut the blooms that morning and arrange them into bouquets. The sale ends at noon or when the flowers run out. Prices were not posted.

Getting ready

A short video of the prep, posted Friday on the Leslie Heffron Art Facebook page, shows two volunteers in the group's green aprons at a table by the tennis courts, with crates of purple asters and piles of cut greens. Others trim greens on the grass nearby.

One volunteer explains that they were cleaning up fillers to go with the dahlias, including Amsonia cut from the group's beds at Grant Circle. She says the flowers bounced back after the recent storm, the forecast looks good and there will be plenty of bouquets. She also tells viewers to expect a long line.

The video then moves to buckets packed with freshly cut dahlias in yellow, white, orange, red and pink, and to a shed lined with shelves of glass vases. People have been dropping off vases for the bouquets, she says, and anyone can donate one. Small to medium sizes work best.

Who tends the Boulevard

Generous Gardeners is an all-volunteer nonprofit that plants and cares for more than 35 public garden spaces in Gloucester. There are no dues, no meetings and no paid staff. Volunteers get together to garden, and the money the group raises goes to plants and upkeep.

Susan Kelly and Terese O'Connell started it in 2011 as a website for donating and swapping plants. It grew into a volunteer crew and was reincorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2014. Most plants still come from volunteers' own gardens.

The group is best known for the harborside gardens along Stacy Boulevard. Its beds start at the Visitor Center at Stage Fort Park and continue past the Betty Smith Garden, planted around Walker Hancock's sculpture of Triton, and the "Picture Garden" behind the Vietnam veterans memorial. Then come the beds by the Avis Murray tennis courts, the anchor and circle beds across from the World War II memorial, and four landscaped paths that cut between the street side and harbor side walks.

The centerpiece is the formal garden: 16 large rectangular beds, eight on each side of the Fishermen's Wives Memorial, plus the memorial's own garden. Farther east, volunteers plant around the pumping station by the Blynman Bridge, the Man at the Wheel and the Ten Pound Island memorial.

Off the Boulevard, their list includes the Main Street planters and hanging baskets, Grant Circle, the Harborwalk, Gus Foote Park, traffic islands in East Gloucester and the Magnolia Library.

A dahlia's year

The Boulevard dahlias do not spend the winter in the ground. After the first frost, volunteers dig up the tubers, let them dry for a day, clean off the soil, trim and separate them, and pack them into breathable crates of vermiculite in a storage locker, as the group showed in a series of short videos last fall.

The tubers stay in storage about six months. In spring, volunteers replant them with bone meal and a grow mix that helps the soil drain, the group explained in a May post.

That makes Saturday's bouquets some of the last Boulevard blooms of the year.

More ways to see the gardens or help

• Plant and tuber sale: the first Saturday in June, 9 a.m. to noon, on Stacy Boulevard near the tennis courts. Extra dahlia tubers from the Boulevard beds are sold until they run out.
• Gloucester Garden Tour: the first Saturday after the Fourth of July. It is the group's main fundraiser and began in 2013 to pay for flowers at the Fishermen's Wives Memorial. Owners in a different part of the city open their private gardens each year. This July's 14th tour drew more than 1,000 visitors to eight gardens, the group says.
• Gala: this year's fundraising gala, held Sept. 24, sold out.
• Dahlia tags: a $100 donation hangs a tag on a Boulevard dahlia cage for two seasons, reading "Sponsored by," "Dedicated to" or "In Honor of."
• Volunteering: everyone is welcome, and the group stresses it is not a garden club. The volunteers page explains how to hear where crews are working next.

Saturday's sale is on our events calendar.

Watch the volunteers get ready (Facebook) · Generous Gardeners volunteer information · Ways to donate