How to Identify and Manage Dahlia Mosaic Virus

14.05.2024 - 16:17 / gardenerspath.com / Kristine Lofgren

How to Identify and Manage Dahlia Mosaic Virus Caulimovirus dahliae

Growing dahlias requires patience. They don’t simply pop up in spring with their big, brilliant flowers.

Instead, the plants slowly develop over the summer until you’re finally rewarded with a colorful display that’s incomparable.

All that slow development leaves lots of time for something to go wrong.

Sometimes, along the way, your plants may start to look funky. Maybe you’ll see distorted growth, or perhaps there’s strange yellowing of the leaves.

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If you see these symptoms, it’s possible that dahlia mosaic virus has found its way to your garden.

If that’s the case, the news isn’t good. This disease is incurable, but if you identify it quickly, you can take steps to save the rest of your dahlias that are as yet unaffected.

So as much as you might want to stick your head in the sand and hope that dahlia mosaic virus goes away, you’ve got to learn how to identify this issue and what you can do to address it.

In this guide, we’ll go over the following to help you do just that:

Dahlias can be infected by numerous viruses, but one of the most common is dahlia mosaic virus (DMV).

It’s a pathogen in the Caulimovirus genus, with the binomial C. dahliae. All of the species in this genus rely on live plants as hosts. It is the only DNA virus to infect dahlias.

Not sure what that means? There are two common types of viruses that infect plants: DNA and RNA.

The difference doesn’t really matter to those of us just trying to grow our flowers, but it’s worth noting that DNA viruses tend to evolve more rapidly and, as a result,