It was a great harvest this year.

Along with the raking and bagging of leaves that is a ritual at this time comes the digging up of gardens and the unearthing of dahlia and canna tubers that get stored in the cellar and replanted in the spring. I usually do this after the first hard frost when the dahlias turn brown and the canna look like dried corn stalks. But while temperatures have dropped into the 30s, flowers are hanging on. A few petunias and marigolds are still blooming, and on Saturday one canna even had a red flower.

I decided not to wait. I promised Carol to leave the petunia and marigolds that seed themselves from one year to the next and got out the shovel, a pair of hand clippers and the plastic bin to store the tubers. The earth was soft. With a couple of cuts into the ground and leveraging the long shovel handle, softball-sized clumps of dahlia tuber emerged. They were packed with dirt, the individual tubers each about the size of a small potato, held together like hands holding hands. Rarely have I had such a bounty with each plant producing as many as a dozen tubers. I filled a plastic tray, knowing that come next spring I would have plenty to give away. The canna, their red roots with white nodules were even more abundant.

I forget when I started planting dahlias, but the memory of how I was introduced to the flower will never fade. The annual harvest of tubers is more than a reminder but also a living connection to the past.

It was Bart Scire who introduced me to the flower. Bart lived in Greenwood and at one time had horses on his property. I never saw the horses, but maybe that is the reason his land was such an ideal place to grow dahlias. He had fields of the flowers. He guessed at least a couple of acres.

As best I knew, this was not a commercial venture although he would advertise cut flowers in the Beacon. That’s what put me on to the story. After stopping down to place an ad – he brought along several of the brightly colored blossoms that made for a cheerful front counter – I arranged to meet him at his house on Spooner Avenue.

Bart ushered me into the kitchen where we chatted before heading out the back door to a patio cluttered with flowerpots and garden furniture that had seen better days. There was a profusion of dahlias. They grew in beds around a swimming pool that obviously had been abandoned for years. Their round heads, some like fireworks, others like pompoms dotted a field of high grass. We walked to the back of the lot. There were more fields with flowers seemingly growing wildly. The varieties were dazzling. Some plants hugged the ground with dainty displays. Others stood three feet high with plate-sized blossoms supported from stalks as thick as a finger. I was full of questions. Was Bart looking to develop a new strain or perfect a color? Where had he gotten so many varieties? What did he plan to do with them all?

As best I could tell, there wasn’t a master scheme. He took delight in showing me his “babies.” As I paused to admire them, he clipped blossoms and when I left, my reporter’s pad was bereft of notes but I had a bouquet of color. I stopped by his house more times that summer to buy bouquets. My mother was thrilled by them.

And then on one of my visits, Bart handed me a bag of tubers with instructions to plant them the following spring. I would get a mix of dahlias, multi-colored and a variety of sizes. Then over several years, one strain of flower, a beige blossom with pointy petals became the dominant plant.

Each spring I’d share from the prior fall’s harvest. Bart’s dahlias were making the rounds from South County to Massachusetts and upstate New York. Sometimes I received tubers in return and in the last few years a red flower has become the commanding dahlia.

I imagined Bart’s wide smile and bright eyes as I dug up the garden. He took delight in something so transitory as a blossom. But there was more to his smile, I realize.

It was the realization the cycle would continue - that after that summer when it came time to dig up thousands of dahlias there would be more tubers and the promise they held. It’s a reward at this time of year when winds scrape trees bare of leaves and even though it’s been an exceptionally warm fall, we know it can’t last.