Community

Being Neighborly | A dahlia delight for nursing home residents

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Community stories are made possible in part by Peninsula Light Co, a proud sponsor of Gig Harbor Now.

As spring turned to summer, the flowers in Jessica McLain’s garden continued to grow and bloom, providing an abundance of color and texture. One of the joys of having such a beautiful garden is to share it with others, and that’s exactly what McLain has been doing. She recently donated buckets full of dahlias to Cottesmore of Life Care, a skilled nursing facility in Gig Harbor, for its Senior Prom event.

This was the first season McLain raised a flower garden, and it was a great success. She had so many blossoms that she couldn’t use them all herself, so she began looking for ways to share them. She settled on donating them.

Jessica McLain in her dahlia garden.

McLain encouraged friends and acquaintances to take some of the bouquets. After exhausting that outlet, she reached out to nursing homes to see if they needed material for flower arranging or bouquet-making activities.

When she heard that Cottesmore was hosting its annual Senior Prom on Aug. 25,  she filled six buckets with dahlias of different varieties and got in touch with activities director Vanessa Becker.

McLain’s dahlias helped make the event special.

“We handed them out during the Senior Prom,” Becker said. “It’s very hard to get donations of flowers, but our residents love them.”

Becker said more than 50 people attended the dance. Staff handed out flowers to each woman as she entered the event, and there were so many flowers that they had some left over. They arranged the leftovers in vases for the nurses’ station and staff and residents enjoyed them for nearly another week.

McLain said she was pleasantly surprised this summer as the flowers began to sprout. She planted nearly 200 dahlia tubers of 75 varieties.

“I fell in love with dahlias in fall last year and spent winter collecting the varieties I wanted to try to grow from different online vendors, mostly individuals, and not large commercial businesses,” she said. “We turned a back corner of our lawn into a garden bed over the winter by laying down cardboard, then piling garden soil on top and covering it with straw until it was ready to plant on Mother’s Day weekend.”

Her dahlias thrived, providing a plethora of color and texture to her yard, but McLain was eager to share the bounty. She sets up a small flower stand in her neighborhood on weekends where she charges $10 for bouquets. But she wants to give them to programs that could use them, and bring joy to others through her new gardening venture.

“I should have flowers until the first frost,” she said. “I plan to see if there is another nursing home that could use them for an activity.”