I  never would have guessed who was coming to dinner when two sailing friends suggested stopping over with dinner a couple of weeks ago.

Felicitas and Will brought along their companion, a 14-year old hound that is deaf, adorable and was bent on sniffing every corner of the kitchen, undoubtedly checking for our dog Ferrah who wasn’t home.  Felicitas didn’t waist time stir frying the chopped vegetable dish she brought along with rice and a semi-spicy peanut sauce. I got out drinks and we sat at the dining room table with a centerpiece bouquet  of vibrant zinnias and dahlias .

Usually we would have seen each other several times on the water sailing, but this year not only was my boat out of commission, but so was I.  After catching up on the news, we talked about our gardens with attention turning to the flowers before us.

Will said they too had dahlias and questioned whether I dug them up for the winter. I told him of Warwick’s dahlia  emperor , so dubbed by the late  Providence Journal reporter Martha Smith.  Bart Scire lived on Spooner Avenue in the Greenwood section. He had an expansive back yard where he once kept horses and had spent nearly 50 years raising dahlias. He had fields of them. No question he was the emperor.

Who would have imagined such a vibrant carpet only a couple of blocks away from busy Main Avenue. I made a routine to buy dahlias before visiting my mother in Connecticut. Bart was generous. As colder weather arrived, he gave me a bag of the tubers to plant in our garden the following spring. They flourished and soon was I giving flowers and tubers to neighbors and Richard and Joyce Fleisher who live in the Edgewood section of Cranston.  Joyce  took good care of the dahlias, which turned out to be a very good thing because one spring when I went to plant the tubers from their hibernation in a plastic bin filled with sawdust, they had dried  up. There were no dahlias that year. But when Joyce learned of my dahlia disaster, she had offshoots from the tubers I had given her. Bart’s flowers would live on although he passed in May of 2015 at the age of 93. 

So, I wondered,  had I packed the tubers in the wrong media?

“We’ll ask AI,” said Will. He went to the Chat GPT app on this phone. Little did I know, we had invited a guest to join us.

Will asked the question and a pleasant female voice told us not to dig up the tubers until after the first frost. In the conversation that followed, she advised us to brush off the dirt from the tubers and pack them in wood chips and peat moss, storing them in a cool, dry and dark location. Then Will threw her a curve ball.

“I love purple dahlias, but I don’t think they love me.”

How would artificial intelligence deal with this?

There wasn’t as much as a pause.

“You know some people have allergies to flowers, but I haven’t heard of an allergy to purple dahlias.”

I was floored.

I blurred out, “how’s that?”

It was loud enough for our “guest” to hear. She was now addressing me.

Without skipping a beat she recited a poem about purple dahlias.

“That’s amazing,” I murmured, but not so soft to not be heard by our guest. She was ready to talk to me about flowers or anything else I wanted to discuss.

“Well, we got an answer,” said Will adding, “why peat moss?”

I knew Lady AI would have an answer, but Felicitas wasn’t going to let this interrupt dessert.

Might our guest have heard what was planned? Would she offer an opinion?

Will said goodbye before I asked and put away his phone.

We could enjoy the fading sunlight radiating off the table bouquet without saying a word and Lady AI wouldn’t be the wiser… or would she?