Surrey Homes | SH49 | November 2018 | Gift supplement inside

Garden
There are 50,000 different dahlia hybrids
idea to lift the tubers once the foliage has been blackened
by frost and hopefully before the stems are badly frosted.
He has a small but compact greenhouse and puts his tubers
in large pots of his own gritty mix (which would have had
daffodils growing in it earlier in the year), after cutting the
stems down to about ten centimetres and drying the tubers
out upside down. This is because the stems of dahlias are
hollow and you don’t want to leave moisture in them for the
winter because it’s likely that they would rot if you did.
In February he will start watering them and once they begin
to sprout he will take any cuttings he wants for his garden.
When he plants out he uses a mycorrhizal fungus product
around their roots to get them off to a good start and will
stake them at this stage, tying them in as they grow on.
This is a good tip as it is so easy to pop them in and
then think that you’ll do it later. They move fast and
sometimes a bit too swiftly and it is so much easier to
start with the stakes in place whilst they are relatively
small. Dahlias are hungry plants and incorporating
well rotted manure will ensure that they flourish.
Once they get going, Dave is generous with his feeding
and will do this weekly. He uses a rotation of products to
encourage both plant growth and flowering. It certainly
works. It seems that if you are showing dahlias the thing
to remember is that a dahlia bud the size of a pea takes
thirty days to mature and for those that know, once
you have selected the best looking bud or young flower
you then take off any side shoots so that the plant’s
energy is concentrated on that particular bloom.
I really liked his selection of dahlias for this year especially
a vibrant red medium semi cactus, D. ‘Andrew Mitchell’
which is definitely on our wish list, D. ‘Avoca Comanche’,
a small semi cactus with peachy orange flowers and a lovely
creamy yellow small decorative, D.‘Winholme Diane’.
The Salutation Garden down in Sandwich has an
annual Dahlia Festival in September and this year they
have had 284 cultivars growing in the garden. These are
currently being photographed and put on their website.
Log on to this as you can order tubers for next year having
had a good look at the myriad varieties they grow.
Steve Edney, The Salutation’s head gardener is mad about
dahlias and is on the RHS Dahlia Committee. They hold
the National Collection of Dark Leaved Dahlias in Sandwich
and have their own dahlia breeding programme there.
Talking of which I saw a beautiful dahlia/aster combination
up in the High Garden at Great Dixter last week. The dahlia
was D. ‘Twyning’s After Eight’ AGM, with its elegant single
white flowers and the darkest of foliage. This was developed
by Mark Twyning in 2004 down at the National Dahlia
Collection now at Varfell Farm, near Penzance in Cornwall.
The Collection was originally based on a private collection
made over many years by David Brown who, when the
dahlia was out of fashion in the eighties and nineties,
‘kept the faith’ and conserved hundreds of varieties.
They were hugely fashionable in the fifties and sixties and
Dan Pearson describes so evocatively taking his little ‘garden in
a seed tray’ to local flower shows as a child where the dahlias
were the domain of men in string vests growing the biggest
and best of everything on their allotments including dahlias
rather than growing them as border plants. And how, despite
their ‘glamour’, dahlias were as much vegetable as flowers.
Interesting that, as the Aztecs used the hollow stems
of Dahlia imperialis as a source of water; some South
American peoples use the leaves medicinally and the
tubers too were harvested as a food product.
Sue Whigham can be contacted on 07810 457948
for gardening advice and help in the sourcing
and supply of interesting garden plants.
National Dahlia Collection
national-dahlia-collection.co.uk 01736 339276
The Salutation Garden, Sandwich, Kent.
CT13 9EW the-salutation.com
01304 619919
Halls of Heddon hallsofheddon.com 01661 852445
Help and advice
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