It’s easy to admire a dahlia from the top down.

Stand in any late-summer garden and they’ll stop you in your tracks — a riot of color, shape, and surprise. Some look like firecrackers in full explosion. Others, delicate tea saucers arranged by a very fussy bee. Petals fold in layers or spike out wildly, as if the flower just couldn’t decide what mood it was in when it bloomed. Ivory, peach, blood orange, deep violet, even nearly black — all glowing like stained glass under sunlight.

But tug gently at the stem — and you’re in for a surprise.

Beneath all that showy beauty is a thick, knobby tuber. Looks a little like a sausage got lost in the garden. Or maybe a cluster of fat toes. Not exactly a crowd-pleaser — until you realize that every bit of brilliance above the ground was fed by that lumpy thing under it.

And it gets better: you can eat it.

That’s right — long before the dahlia made its way into wedding bouquets and prize-winning garden shows, it was growing wild in the mountains of Mexico and Guatemala. And back then? It wasn’t a flower. It was food. The Aztecs roasted dahlia tubers. Spanish botanists classified them as vegetables, because they were edible — starchy, crunchy, with a flavor somewhere between a potato and a radish. (Some say with a hint of apple. Depends on who you ask. And what kind of dahlia you’re chewing.)

To this day, the dahlia’s underground portion stores water and nutrients — helping it survive dry seasons and re-grow year after year. And while seeds do exist, most gardeners skip them. Seeds don’t guarantee anything. You want predictable beauty? You plant a tuber. That’s the anchor. That’s the food source. That’s where the life comes from.

And maybe that’s the wonder.

Because despite the hundreds of varieties — tall and short, spotted and solid, stiff and flowing — they all work the same way. Every bloom draws its life from the same type of root.

Doesn’t that sound familiar?

Look around your congregation — or a convention crowd — and you’ll see a garden of every shape and shade. Sisters in sunhats. Brothers in wheelchairs. Elders from the islands, pioneers from the mountains, and newly baptized teens with shy smiles and wrinkled suits. Every single one of them a bloom. Different in appearance. Different in experience. But all of them fed by the same source — the arrangement Jehovah put in place.

It doesn’t matter whether we came into the truth on a college campus or through a prison Bible study. Whether we were raised around spiritual things or stumbled into the Kingdom Hall holding a cigarette and a question. We’re all drawing nourishment from the same provision — the faithful and discreet slave (Matthew 24:45), delivering food at the proper time.

Not a hundred versions of the truth. Not personalized arrangements for different climates or cultures. One root system — feeding all of us. The same talks, the same magazines, the same Bible, the same hope. And look at the beauty that springs from it.

Dahlias bloom late in the season — right about the time other flowers are calling it quits. As the air begins to shift and gardens grow quiet, dahlias keep going — throwing color into the cooling world like they were saving the best for last. A final burst of brilliance before the frost.

It doesn’t need a metaphor. It’s beautiful enough on its own.

But maybe next time you see a dahlia — or better yet, plant one — think about what’s happening below the soil. The bloom catches the eye, but it’s what’s hidden that makes it all possible. And in a way, the beauty we see in our brothers and sisters, and in Jehovah’s organization as a whole, isn’t about drawing attention to itself — it reflects the One who feeds it.

The faithful and discreet slave delivers the food. Jehovah provides the life. And the bloom — every act of faith, every spiritual victory, every display of unity — magnifies Him.