How to choose dahlias you actually cut.

On choosing for form, colour and use.

Dahlias, along with annuals are the backbone of a nascent cutting garden. When starting out, these will be no doubt the first plants you grow. Cheap and with the quickest resulting buckets of blooms. Perennials and shrubs will take a few years to establish so a collection of dahlias will give you dramatic focal flowers from about late July through to the frosts (ha).  In a season that roughly measures around 28 weeks of the year, Dahlias will flower for about 13+ weeks which is a huge chunk. Most perennials will do several weeks with annuals blooming for around 6+.  You can see why dahlias are so useful and having a huge renaissance.

Currently my absolute go to for dahlia ordering is Halls of Heddon¹ and their catalogue is enormous. Where on earth do you start?

When I was first grew dahlias, I’d print off photos of flowers and move them about working out combinations between them, balancing shape and colour. I flipping love Dahlias, but they are big, all one texture of petal and frankly they are not enough; they need the supporting chorus of perennials, bulbs, annuals and foliage to really shine. Don’t fill all your available space just with dahlias, be rigorous in your edit and choose plants that will perform as stars in your arrangements and compliment what you already have growing in your space.

I am choosing next years dahlia plants right now. This year I lifted all my stock and replanted without buying any new ones. I have serious envy coupled with some of my favourites not making the transfer so well. The best time to order any plant is just as it is going over. If you wait until you need them, they will have sold out of all the good ones.

Only two dahlias here in this combination with chrysanthemums, rudbeckias, grasses and cosmos.

Nurseries show great pictures of individual flowers, and whilst a vase of single variety flowers will always look chic, mostly, dahlias look best mixed; shining best when they are very much the minority player in a display. I like mixing them with grasses, persicaria, crocosmia, salvias, coreopsis together with the foliage of physocarpus, cotinus and cornus. So how do you choose which ones that might work well in combination?

Flowers conditioned and waiting to be arranged in September

I have a rule when choosing dahlias and this is it.

GOLDEN RULE

Dahlias must fit in to one or both categories to be worthy of planting;