Birds, bees and, above all, blooms—thousands of dahlia flowers growing among Two Meadow Farm’s two bucolic meadows. Strolling through their neatly unwild rows in North Haven still felt like communing with nature, in part because the bees felt it, too. So contentedly were they gathering their nectar and pollen that they didn’t seem to notice the competition, even when they were three to a flower.
Jacqueline Maisonpierre, farmer, and Jerome Oertling, groundskeeper and maintenance director, founded Two Meadow Farm in 2021. In late September, 2023, they hosted their wedding there, timing it for the season open-air dahlia growers spend the rest of the year cultivating: peak bloom.
In Connecticut, at least, it’s no simple route to that summit. Dahlias aren’t perennial in our agricultural zone, as Maisonpierre calls it, meaning that, without an artificial habitat of, say, a greenhouse, growers must take extra steps to keep them going from one year to the next. The first frost, which causes the dahlias to die back, is the sign to begin cutting down the plants for winter, which leads to what I hear is the really fun part: digging up the tubers, the starchy underground root stems that supply each plant with nutrients and retain its special genetics. Those tubers, this year numbering roughly 1,200 at Two Meadow, are the foundation of next year’s crop, so, starting in December, Maisonpierre—who’s also done little things like birth two children and gain her nutritionist’s license over the past few years—carefully “divides, washes [and] labels” them before packing them away. Come February, she’s monitoring them in storage, which sounds like a relative reprieve. But it isn’t long before March’s need to prep the fields and plan the year’s plantings, which will begin in April, when it’s time to “wake the tubers up” and “jump back into farming action.”
The planning of what to plant for a new growing season stokes some of the fire that caused Maisonpierre to fall in love with dahlias—whose whopping eight sets of chromosomes have been recombined into roughly 60,000 varieties and counting—in the first place. “I’m a real science nerd,” she says. “I did my undergraduate thesis in evolutionary fern biology with a fern geneticist. So I got exposed to plant genetics and just really respect and admire and am fascinated by the diversity of that octoploidy—that bank of genetic information… There are so many [dahlia] varieties, and you can just get totally lost in them,” including by following the urge to play and experiment. Maisonpierre says she does that in her lower meadow, where she’s letting new varieties “bloom out so I can see their behaviors and personalities and their growth habits.”
“Blooming out,” pretty much just what it sounds like, is something dahlia growers don’t allow if they intend to sell the flower, which needs to be cut before it’s wholly unfurled in order to give customers more time with it once it is. A wrinkle in that logic has emerged this peak season, when it made sense to let some flowers more fully bloom on the stem in order to complement two inaugural communal dinners on the farm last weekend. (Impressively, especially to a city slicker, Oertling, who works by day as an environmental consultant, built all the picnic tables—differently sized, rock solid and pretty, too—for the occasion.) Those sold-out gatherings were so successful that an encore, on Sunday, October 12, has been added to the farm’s calendar, which includes weekly Open Farm Days through October 11 and, on October 19, a flower-arranging class with “acclaimed NYC floral designer” Molly Oliver.
Maisonpierre says most of the farm’s recent revenue has come one of three ways: selling flowers on those Open Farm Days; selling shares of a seven-week dahlia CSA, which is underway and sold-out; and wholesaling through the “incredible” Middletown-based Connecticut Flower Collective, which “connects me with hundreds of buyers,” handles most of the logistics and gives small local flower growers enough combined heft and scale to attract and satisfy larger accounts.
That speaks to one bottom line. You could say another is Maisonpierre’s bedrock love for farming, which she says she “can’t not” do. During college, she spent a semester “WWOOFing” via Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, an organization that connects budding farmers with volunteer working, learning and traveling opportunities in exchange for room and board. After college, she found herself working close to where she grew up, on a farm in Bethel, which also happens to be where a certain flower made a strong first impression. “They grew dahlias there,” she remembers, “and I just absolutely loved having my hands in the dirt and working hard and being outside every day.” She then took an organic farming apprenticeship in Maine, whose conclusion made way for her to become, in 2013, the first paid employee at New Haven Farms. Maisonpierre managed seven urban farms for the food farming-meets-nutritional education nonprofit, then took on the top leadership role, eventually shepherding the organization into a merger with the New Haven Land Trust to form Gather New Haven.
Along the way, Maisonpierre’s drive for dahlias endured. A dahlia is “dramatic… She’s confident, magical, sparkly. And she’s solid,” with an “immense stem. [She] is just so statuesque.” Maisonpierre marvels at the fact that September’s plants “went into the ground as a ‘potato’ [in May] and are now almost seven feet tall. They are monsters.” A fun world of varietal names including A La Mode, American Dawn, Blizzard, Boom Boom, Caribbean Fantasy and Creme de Cognac, all of which, among several dozen others, are grown on Two Meadow Farm, indicates she’s not remotely alone in her enthusiasm for dahlias. But few would follow that passion so passionately as to start and run a farm, of which the rest of us can be, like those birds and bees and blooms, among its blessed beneficiaries.
Written by Dan Mims. Image, featuring Jacqueline Maisonpierre on the farm, provided courtesy of Two Meadow Farm.
