2026 Dahlia Duke-out

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Introduction

If the NCAA can have March Madness, then the Portland Dahlia Society can have a "Dahlia Duke-Out". This is a contest run strictly for fun to decide a "People's Choice" winner from the 32 entries with the highest test garden scores in the "Best of 2025" list. Starting May 8, two entries from the list will be pitted against each other. You, the people, will vote on which one you like. The winners of the first round will then be pitted against each other, until we run through the Elite Eight, the Final Four, and the Championship round on June 7.

The winner will be presented with the warm thoughts and admiration of the community.

Voting runs from 6 AM until 2 AM. In order to vote, you must register and get a username. We do that to restrict the voting to one vote per person, because the stakes are so high.

If you have any questions or issues, please contact the webmaster.

Registration

To register your chosen username, which is the "ticket" to being able to vote, please click here,

Voting

The competition is all over for this year. Thanks for playing!

Regions

The four regions are arbitrarily named after the four compass quadrants, NW, NE, SW, and SE. To view the list of "teams" and their seeds, click these:

• Northwest Region
• Southwest Region
• Northeast Region
• Southeast Region
• Final Four

Methodology

If you're curious about how we set this up, here is a summary.

We started with the 75 entries in the Americal Dalia Society's "Best of 2024" list. It turns out 75 is not a convenient number for a bracket scheme, without having some "wild card" games. In addition, we didn't want this nonsense to last more than a month. If you have N teams in a single-elimination tournament, you need to have N-1 games to decide a winner. That meant 64 was too many (two months), so we settled on 32.

So, we sorted the ADS "best of" list by their Trial Garden and Seedling Bench Scores. We took the top 32 entries, and those are the "teams" in our tournament. To make it a little like March Madness, we divided the set up into four "regions". The top four entries by score became the number 1 seeds in the four regions. The next four entries by score became the number 2 seeds, and so on.

The NCAA uses a very specific scheme to decide the first matchups. They want to make sure to give the top seeds as much chance as possible, so they don't pit number 1 against number 2 right away. Instead, their first round matches the number 1 seed with the number 8 seed, number 2 plays number 7, number 3 plays number 6, and number 4 plays number 5. We have adopted the same system here.

In case of a tie, the entry with the better (lower) seed will be deemed the winner.

Prose Credits

The "flowery" descriptions of each bloom used on the games pages were generously provided by:

Jordan Garman Bonnie Providenza John Providenza

Photo Credits

The photos used on this web site came from the ADS New Introductions announcement. The photos are thanks to:

Heidi Zierdt Linda Taylor Heather Ramsay Terry Schroeder Michael Shukofsky Wayne Lobaugh Tammy Opalka Christine Tareen Mel Epstein Elijah Olson

Mike Ramsay Ted Kennedy Alan Fisher Jim Lamson Connie Young-Davis Ron MinerSteve Meggos Rosie Cooper-Vert Karen Sanchez David Smith Doris Smith

Anne Maria Jacobson Jim Teeple Tiffany Jacob Robert Eagle Kamille Sellick Lee Pusch Steve Lamb Debbie Pavich John Spangenberg Diana Shandro Rich Gibson