Dishing on the dahlias
My who's who of the dahlias new and old alike for growing in 2025
A favourite arrangement last year of dahlias - Tangerine Dream (small of the white and orange), Edinburgh (white and purple) Holland Festival (large peach orange and white) and Irish Pinwheel (small buff yellow) with wisteria and dill foliage.
Increasingly, I grow plants because A, it makes me feel connected to our dying earth and B, the seasonal tasks they demand pull my mind through the year.
Dahlias are a big pull from this point of limbo between Christmas and the New Year right to next summer and autumn of 2025 when they’ll flower with gusto provided they are - planted between March and June, protected from slugs, are given full sun and planted into rich soil, are fed with seaweed feed (ideally) and are in the main staked unless they are short varieties which to be honest I don’t tend to grow.
Regarding staking now is the time for forage both sapling birch and hazel its so mild it will be good to do this sooner rather than later, the sap is rising in fact its hardly gone to sleep. Hazel is especially good for staking dahlias. Long, straight hazel canes can be coppiced, perfect for making grids across flower beds full of the sleeping tubers or the branches with little outstretched twigs on either side are great for wigwams and staking plants singularly and those that are being grown in pots.
I went to town with dahlias last year. Planting them into a fenced off area of my rented chicken paddock that I had prepared with a layer of cardboard over the heavy clay and grass and then spent yes ok lets admit it, I spent £300 on 4 tones of Melcourt compost. crackers much? not really why scrimp on good compost and by the way, Melcourt is the best if not one of the best peat free brands in a market of very crap peat free composts. Then I was rushed for time and all the dahlias I had to then directly plant here in the middle of May.
This gamble paid off as they were not all munched by slugs and they grew like gusto. The final thing about dahlias is that they have to be picked they thrive on it, they thrive on feeling they have to produce more flowers. And ok one more thing once you master either lifting or mulching their tubers depending on your situation they are pretty perennial too. Their tubers get bigger season after season so for dahlias that you really like you can beef up your original stock of them.
Anyway, the point of this post is highlighting to you, the dahlias that I’ve already eyed up for 2025.
When I first started growing dahlias, I went for dark reds and oranges and deep purples all very Quality chocolate Street primary colours, garish heavy but beautiful and rich.
Taste, the more you delve into flowers and especially so, once you start to cut them to take indoors changes, because interiors really allow the colours you instinctively like to suddenly expand in surprising ways. I now love fairground colours, the bi coloured, ice cream, can I have raspberry sauce on my Mr Whippy please dahlias. I wouldn’t want a whole flower bed of them but I no longer actually want loads of dark red dahlias, I’m sort of over having an Adam’s Family colour chart of blood reds clashed with a jaffa cake orange.
Dahlias Tartan (large white and mulberry) Tangerine Dream (round orange and white) and Hans Auinger (star like white, vanilla and stripes of orange)
I even like (a select few) white dahlias especially if they resemble stars because they bounce off a lot of common household appliances like marble white surfaces and gold taps, basically I like white dahlias in bathrooms. I also like the white star faces of flowers in some mixed colour pallets because I’m currently obsessed with the word Millefleur. I love that some of the bantam hens so little with their little slipper feathered feet have a regal title of Barbu d’U’ccle Millefleur with their golden and mahogany feathers each tipped with a white blob perfectly. So I like white now and then mixed into harvest colours. The shades of desert yellows and bronze, orange saffron reds. The trifle colour combination is a great thing indeed - raspberry rich pink and magenta reds as it goes into custard and white!
The other aspect of dahlias that I constantly keep in mind, is what absolute nectar and pollen rich watering holes they can be for our much in peril pollinators, this is something easily forgotten. Those dahlias that are single, semi double or of the anemone class are wonderful for bees and butterflies so don’t just go for the totally decorative ones. A personal rule of mine is that for every sterile, big blowsy dahlia I grow I have to try and have two others that are good for pollinators alongside them.
dahlias blue bayou (purple - butterflies love this one) Rhubarb and Custard ( peach, vanilla with sugar pink highlights ) Molly Raven (fully double, sea urchin lavish, purplish pink) with Lou Farman and Waltzing Matilda both dropping out of shot .
My line up for 2025
WHAT ABOUT GROWING THEM FROM SEED? There is increasingly worthy seed packets of dahlias to grow from seed. You can grow a crop of 30 plants that will flower by July like bought tubers for little expense in comparison. The ‘Bishops Children Mix’ is a wonderful seed packet as the dark foliaged seedlings will result in a rich, Notre-Dame stained glass window array of ruby colours and they flower very prolifically with each flower welcoming in bees, hoverflies and butterflies. I grew them to fill the Emma Bridgewater factory with dahlias and they did not disappoint. The tubers bulk up well within one season so are well worth lifting or mulching.
I’m trailing the cactus group seed mix this coming year. I’ll be sowing them in April. I have a feeling not all of them will be keepers but they look like a jolly jumble and have wonderful starburst petals surrounding a welcoming open bee bar of a single middle. Remember that for good seed germination and growth of seedlings that compost of good quality is key - I have found Melcourt to give the most trusted results, a lot of the other peat free mixes are not worth the money of buying!
Cactus group dahlia seed mix Bishops Children seed mix
Dahlia Molly Raven - a very good vase life, vigorous with an attractive dark green foliage on strong stems too and able to cope in a decent sized pot or plant in the ground. Wonderful sugar to deep pink watery to dark underside petal tones. Exclusive to Sarah Raven. Hot on the heels of Molly Raven is a newly bred dahlia by SR named after the lovely garden photographer who is Jonathan Buckley. This is a single, bee attractive variety that I am definitely planting, a wonderful star fish like appearance.
dahlia Jonathan Buckley dahlia Molly Raven
Staying with pink and my final pink because you need a lot of colour dilution in the garden to stop it becoming a barbie box is Dahlia Rhubarb and Custard aptly named as its flowers are a wonderful opening bonnet like blend of yellow and cream flecked with raspberry pink- semi double so good for pollinators. This is one that becomes especially beautiful in the vase as a cut dahlia but it also suits large pots too. Rhubarb and Custard
Straight into large but marvellous circus tent costume comes Frost Nip. I grew this last year and loved it. Its a large plant so one for the allotment or cutting bed but so productive and I loved picking its big flowers as they opened to being fully out. Wonderful and dramatic as a single stem or mixed with others.
Tartan is a dahlia whose tubers are quite small considering the big flowers it grows. I love how garish this one is, it is dramatic and as look at me as a dahlia could be out in the garden. I did not grow enough of Tartan last year so I am planting more for cutting. I had some in pots too and they coped and flowered well but those big flower heads need decent staking support unsurprisingly. Its a mixer that often works when paired with orange and whites just the odd one here and there to liven up the mix.
Irish Pinwheel - This was a wonderful dahlia last year, like a curled up but not too tight little feathered ball of a flower. It reminded me of my bouffant plumed cochin hens. Its flower heads are a perfect size for cutting into single vases or mixed arrangements and are a useful warm honey jar orange and yellow. You could easily add this variety into a mixed flower bed its not too overwhelming or huge but flowers its socks off. I was really impressed with the one plant I had as most weeks when I had flower demonstrations every flower had to be cut off and by the following week new buds were sprouting with gusto. I need to grow more of it in 2025 and I hope the tuber from last year comes back as its been mulched!
Dahlia Happy Single Date - This is a wonderful tall dahlia of rich orange flowers, touched burnished cinnamon brown and a dark good custard yellow. Its one of my favourites for pots.
I never thought I’d be ordering a dahlia like this one! It reminds me of the shaggy feathers of a Sebastopol goose and of course every flower would be cut for the vase, I would not want it in the garden but it would be one worth having on the allotment plot, it is unlike any other! I also cannot pronounce its name! Tsuki-yori-no-shisha!
2025 was dreadful for butterflies and bees with the cold and rain over the summer. Blue Bayou remains the most attractive to red admirals and peacocks thanks to its purple, buddleia like colour that butterflies especially home in on. Its a good strong grower and prolific in flowers.
Wonderful to read this this morning! Talk of dahlias, trifles, circuses and ice cream colours….. bees, butterflies and chickens…… 💕❤️🐝🦋
A great selection of varieties that I hadn’t, for the most part, seen before. I’m off to investigate! Thank you for the recommendations.
Also re compost, I work in a garden centre plant area, and increasingly customers are grumbling about the quality of compost. It is more challenging with peat free but Melcourt are so much better than the rest of the usual garden centre brands. £300 was a spendy spend, can’t argue with that, but one that will hopefully repay the garden over time