While hundreds visited the Volunteer Park Conservatory last week to witness the fetid but incomplete bloom of a rare corpse flower, a more dependable Volunteer Park bloom is also playing out in the nearby dahlia garden. Located near the lawn in front of the conservatory, the dahlia garden in Volunteer Park has been maintained by the Puget Sound Dahlia Association — “the Northwest’s largest and most active dahlia club” — for more than 30 years. In the spring, volunteers plant hundreds of bulbs. By late summer, we get to enjoy the blooms of their labor. Later in the fall, the beds will be dug up and prepared for another planting next year.

If you love the dahlias and want to help foster some Capitol Hill growth of a different nature, frequent CHS contributor Alex Garland is selling prints of the photographs featured. You can help support his work and put a few colorful images of Volunteer Park on your wall here. We’re looking for ways to continue to grow the opportunities for readers to support CHS and the people who work on the site — plus we think it would be plain cool to make it easy for people to put pieces of CHS on their walls. If you know of a good solution for easily integrating photography sales into a WordPress site like ours, let us know. In the meantime, may we suggest the metal 8×12 (Wall art > Metal > 8″x12″)? It would look swell on your wall, for sure.

More colorful Volunteer Park dahlias, below.