As I spend my weekend staking, tying and fertilizing 100 dahlia plants, I think back to what started my obsession.

I started as lifestyle editor at the Pocono Record in 1985, one of the first people I met was the librarian, a wiry man named Frank Tamulis.They had just ruled that cigarette smoking wasn't allowed in the newsroom. That was a war I escaped, but the aftershock of the staff being divided into smokers and nonsmokers could be felt. The other departments allowed smoking, so some of our reporters would duck out in the afternoon and do their work in the classified department.Frank was one of the smokers. He holed himself away in a tiny room that was a true newspaper morgue. Every day Frank painstakingly cut apart articles and photos from a stack of newspapers. He would use rubber cement to glue the articles on brown 8½-by-11 paper. On each one in his tiny handwriting he would reference every topic that the article contained. He would then sometime between cigarettes file them away.If you walked in to talk to Frank you would be overwhelmed by the toxic smell of rubber cement and smoke.And you wanted to talk to Frank because he knew all and remembered all.Pity the photographer who had to walk through the library to get to the dark room.Frank was a former military man. That's what made him so good at his job. He took in every detail and organized it.Because of this extraordinary attention to detail, Frank also typed all weddings, engagements and anniversaries for me. It was funny because he hadn't married, but he sure had commentary on the families.Frank had several quirks, but the most interesting was that he refused to read bulletin boards."Had enough of that in the Army," he said. It was required, he said.So if we were having a meeting, or a party, I had to tell him.I'd pop in and say, "Frank did you see …"I don't read bulletin boards, he'd say. "Had enough of that in the Army."One day he told me he was popping out to talk to the garden club. "They want to see my dahlias."They are begging to see my garden," he said.I was young and didn't know a trowel from a clippers and barely knew a marigold from a petunia.He brought in a beautiful multicolored dahlia and I fell in love with the flower.He must have liked me because the next year he brought me a tuber.I went home and planted it in unprepared dirt and nothing happened. How embarrassing.He never gave me another one.One day Frank came to tell me he was leaving. He was getting married and moving to the Midwest with a woman I didn't even know he was dating. This was a time before Facebook and email and he wasn't going to write. "Had enough of that in the Army."We later heard that he died of cancer. I hope they had beautiful dahlias at his service.I grew wiser in all things gardening over the next 15 years and started to venture out to do garden stories.I moved and began to start my own gardens, with bulbs and perennials.Ronnie and I were married just a few weeks when I got a mailer for a dinnerplate dahlia collection."Oh, I always wanted to grow dahlias," I said. The man who pulled out my crocus bulbs because he thought they were wild onions was still so in love that he replied, "Then you should have them."We put a garden in just for the dahlias and they grew and blossomed. I entered a few in the West End Fair that year and won some ribbons.We were both mesmerized by the beauty and bought more, and more. We dig them out and store them every winter, but we always add a few more to the collection.We give them out to people in nursing homes and other places. Often people remark that they remember their mothers or grandmothers planted them.A flower can transport you to another world and fill you with memories.For me, the dahlia, in its perfect beauty, reminds me of those early days in the newsroom and a special man who didn't read bulletin boards but loved to grow flowers.