‘Nicholas’ Dahlia

Fall Garden Border with ‘Nicholas’ Dahlia Autumn doesn't mean color has to call it quits in your garden! Use mums, dahlias, sedum, salvia and switchgrass to make a splash when temperatures start to cool off. Grow flowers that pop with fall color

When not in flower, it’s fair to say dahlia plants rarely command a second glance. In fact, to the uninitiated, they could be easily mistaken for potatoes, not that surprising when you consider that these two fast-growing, frost-tender tuberous species share a surprising amount of common ground regarding their geographical range in the wild and their fondness for a certain set of growing conditions that includes a rich, moist but free-draining soil in full sun or light shade. But the comparison ends there. Unlike potatoes, which are valued solely as a tasty food crop, dahlias are generally prized for the otherworldly beauty of their often large and vividly colourful flowers.

Learning about dahlia care is a great first step for beginners who want to grow these showy, colorful blooms in their gardens.

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What would us gardeners do without dahlias? If your garden needs more colour in summer: plant some dahlias. If it needs more colour in autumn: plant some dahlias. If it needs some tall plants to make the back of the garden more colourful: plant some dahlias. If you’re looking for some easy cut flowers to grow that come back year after year: plant some dahlias. If there’s a colour missing in your garden (except blue!): there’s a dahlia for it.

What did you do with your dahlias this year? Did you enjoy them flowering in your garden? Did you bring some inside as cut flowers? Did you carefully dig up the tubers and and settle them into trays of peat-free compost in the shed to overwinter? I did all of those things, but I also ate some with a nice chianti*

Hurricane Barney battered the garden a bit last week, but it seems to have withstood the weather

At the beginning of December I turned our first dahlia tubers into dahlia pan haggerty, which turned out to be quite nice. Just before Christmas I was translating Mexican dahlia ‘yam’ recipes, as you do, looking for ways to use the rest of the harvest. Most of the ideas were fairly undramatic, involving boiling dahlia tubers for quite some time and then serving them in some sort of salad. A little further into my research I came across something a lot more intriguing – dahlia desserts.

Dahlias may still be out of fashion in many gardening circles but I am an affectionado and think they are well worth growing.

The hot subject for discussion this Autumn seems to be the renaissance of Dahlias. For me they have never been far from my garden but I understand how fashions come and go then return.

‘Fiery’ hardly does justice to this cactus Dahlia.

Dahlias are having a good year due to the summer rain. Slugs permitting my Cactus Dahlias will have given one of the best shows for several years by November when they get cut down and stored. As I expect the flower power will still be present until the first frosts in November I am going to give them a foutnightly tonic of liquid fertiliser and a further mulch.