Reconstructing “The Evolution of the Dahlia”

Copyright © 2026 by Steve K. Lloyd
All rights reserved

Editor's Introduction

Fourteen numbered chapters of J. J. Broomall’s projected The Evolution of the Dahlia book survive. They were published over a span of years, first in Broomall’s own Dahlia Guides and later in the catalogs of Success Dahlia Gardens. They do not survive, however, in a form that allows their printed numbers to be treated automatically as the order of the book Broomall intended eventually to publish.

The distinction matters because Broomall himself tells us that the published serial was not yet the book. In Chapter Nine, responding to readers who could no longer obtain all of the earlier installments, he states that he intended to “re-write and re-arrange” the chapters, add further material on the culture and propagation of the dahlia, and publish the whole in book form. The surviving numbered chapters should therefore be understood as components of a projected book rather than as a completed book whose final table of contents happens to have been preserved.

No such table of contents survives. Neither does a manuscript showing Broomall’s contemplated rewriting and rearrangement. The numbered sequence ends without an authorial conclusion explaining either the organization of the whole or the reason the series stops where it does. Several promised developments are absent from the surviving record. Most notably, Broomall announces in Chapter Thirteen that he is withholding a particular propagation method for the projected book, but no surviving text reviewed for this edition can be identified confidently as that promised section.

The present edition therefore faces a choice that cannot be avoided merely by reproducing the chapters in numerical order. To do so would preserve their serial sequence, but it would risk presenting that sequence as though it were Broomall’s settled book structure when his own surviving statement tells us that he intended to revise it. To renumber the chapters according to a newly reconstructed order would go too far in the opposite direction, supplying an authorial act for which no evidence survives.

This edition takes a middle course. The fourteen surviving numbered chapters are presented in a reconstructed reading order based on the strongest surviving relationships among them. Each chapter is presented under a reader-facing title, while its original serial number and date remain immediately visible as documentary information. Thus a text originally published as Chapter Nine remains identifiable as Broomall’s Chapter Nine without requiring the reader to navigate a sequence that visibly jumps from Chapter Eleven to Chapter Nine to Chapter Twelve. The serial number records the history of the text; its position in this edition records an editorial judgment about how the surviving material can most coherently be read.

This distinction is fundamental to the reconstruction. The edition does not claim to have recovered Broomall’s lost table of contents. It preserves the surviving chapters as historical artifacts while arranging them as a reading sequence.

The evidence for that arrangement is not uniform. Only two joins in the reconstructed sequence rest on Broomall’s own explicit forward signals. Chapter One points directly to material to be taken up in the next chapter, and Chapter Four pre-announces the subject developed in Chapter Five. The remaining relationships are editorial reconstructions of varying confidence. Some are strongly supported by continuity of argument or development; others, particularly in the later portion of the sequence, are necessarily weaker.

The reconstructed order begins with the chapters originally numbered One and Two. Together they establish several of the questions that occupy much of the surviving work: the transformation of the dahlia, the inheritance of doubleness, apparent failures of otherwise good varieties, and the distinction between inherited character and temporary effects of cultivation or environment. Their relationship is unusually secure because Chapter One explicitly promises the discussion taken up in Chapter Two.

The chapter originally numbered Four follows. This is an editorial placement. Broomall did not identify Chapter Four as the next step after Chapter Two, but the chapter materially revises and enlarges the causal inquiry established in the opening installments. In particular, it records an important change in Broomall’s explanation of how doubleness in dahlias first arose. His earlier explanation centered on repeated pollination, followed by cultivation and inheritance; in Chapter Four he instead identifies a superabundance of plant food as the principal cause of the first double dahlia. Placing this chapter while the earlier explanation remains fresh allows the development of Broomall’s thinking to remain visible rather than separating proposition from revision.

The chapter originally numbered Five then follows on firmer evidence. Chapter Four itself anticipates the subject developed there. The Secret of Success turns the search for causes into something approaching a general method: close observation, repeated testing, cultivation, selection, and refusal to accept appearances as sufficient explanation.

Chapter Six continues that movement by applying causal investigation to stunted plants, propagation, and cultivation. Its concern with temporary weakness, soil condition, nourishment, propagation, and local conditions grows naturally from the questions already established. That continuity is editorial rather than authorially marked, but it gives the chapter a strong place within the developing argument.

At this point the present edition places the chapter originally numbered Three, Classification. This is the most conspicuous relocation in the earlier portion of the book. The chapter is fundamentally classificatory. It defines and disputes the names of dahlia forms rather than advancing the causal argument that dominates the preceding chapters. Nothing in the surviving evidence requires it to stand immediately after Chapter Two simply because it originally carried the number Three.

Placed here, Classification performs a different and useful function. After the sustained discussion of causation, heredity, cultivation, and variation, Broomall pauses to consider the visible forms into which the dahlia has diversified and the increasingly unstable language used to describe them. The chapter thus becomes an editorial pivot from questions of cause toward the later chapters concerned more directly with color, appearance, variation, perception, and environment.

The chapters originally numbered Seven, Ten, and Eleven form the next related group. Color in Dahlias takes up the color question Broomall had postponed earlier. Color and Fragrance of Dahlias extends the inquiry into perception, description, environmental influence, and sensory variation. Climatic Influence and Temperamental Dahlias widens the field further by considering locality, season, cultivation, and cultivar temperament as interacting causes of performance. These chapters were not joined by explicit continuation notices, but together they trace a coherent movement from visible variation toward Broomall’s increasingly complex recognition that the same variety may behave differently under different conditions and that simple explanations are often inadequate.

The reconstructed sequence then turns back toward breeding with the chapter originally numbered Nine, Seeds and Seedlings, and Some Other Topics. This chapter is important not only for its discussion of pollination, ancestry, and the limits of prediction, but also because it contains Broomall’s clearest surviving statement of his intention to rewrite and rearrange the numbered material for book publication.

The chapter originally numbered Twelve, Seeds and Seedlings, follows because it forms the clearest conceptual pair with Nine among the later chapters. Chapter Nine stresses the limits of prediction and control in breeding. Chapter Twelve supplies the practical response: grow large numbers, test parents through their progeny, select severely, and discard relentlessly. The relationship is one of problem and method, but there is no surviving continuation notice proving that Broomall intended these chapters to stand together. Their adjacency is editorial.

The transition from Chapter Twelve to the chapter originally numbered Thirteen is the least strongly evidenced join in the reconstructed sequence. Chapter Twelve concludes the principal breeding movement by asking how superior plants are found through crossing, testing, and selection. The Green Plant Question then turns from obtaining desirable plants to propagating and maintaining them. The progression is intelligible, but no claim is made that Broomall himself specified it.

The chapter originally numbered Fourteen follows because it shares a close practical and terminological field with Chapter Thirteen. The propagation discussion of green plants, cuttings, planting depth, buried joints, and tuber formation gives way to a more focused discussion of roots, bulbs, and tubers and of the different functions Broomall assigns to feeding roots and storage structures.

Following this chapter, the edition appends a short later passage, "Planting the Dahlia," excerpted from Broomall's 1934 newspaper series My Experiences in the Improvement of Plants. The full parent installment is reproduced elsewhere in this volume. The passage is included here not as a missing chapter and not as evidence of Broomall's intended sequence, but as a later practical application of distinctions developed in Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen.

The reconstructed sequence closes with Dahlias Now and the Dahlia of the Future, originally Chapter Eight.

There is no evidence that Broomall intended Chapter Eight to be the conclusion of his book. Its position here is an editorial decision based on the reading arc of the surviving material, not a recovered fact about authorial intention. The chapter connects backward to many of the concerns developed elsewhere: old and young tubers, newly formed root systems, cultivation depth, surface-root injury, heat, drought, mulch, and apparent deterioration. Its final movement then turns outward toward the future development of the dahlia. Among the surviving numbered chapters, that forward-looking movement provides the strongest available closing arc.

The intended conclusion of Broomall’s projected book is unknown, but the surviving record does show that he expected additional material beyond the fourteen numbered chapters. In Chapter Thirteen he announces that he knows an outdoor method of increasing stock under natural conditions without injuring the vitality of the dahlia, then deliberately withholds the procedure for the book on The Evolution of the Dahlia that he hoped to publish within a year. No surviving text reviewed for this edition can be identified confidently as that promised section. The teaser therefore establishes that the projected work was still unfinished and expanding, without supplying a recoverable Chapter Fifteen or a lost ending.

Dahlias Now and the Dahlia of the Future consequently closes this edition’s reconstructed reading sequence because the editor has chosen that terminus among the surviving numbered chapters. Broomall supplied the chapter and its vision of the future; the editor supplied its final position.

The reconstructed order is not offered as a rediscovered table of contents or as an attempt to complete the book Broomall did not finish. It is an evidence-weighted reading order that preserves the identities and documentary histories of the surviving chapters while distinguishing, as far as the record permits, between relationships Broomall himself made explicit and relationships supplied by editorial judgment.

Where Broomall’s own signals survive, they are followed. Elsewhere the strength of the editorial case varies and is acknowledged accordingly. The purpose is not to make an incomplete work appear complete, but to allow the surviving components of Broomall’s unfinished book to be read together as coherently as possible without representing editorial reconstruction as authorial design.