Garden trends - dahlias for an autumn WOW factor

Once seen as the preserve of flower shows, dahlias are more popular than ever thanks to social media – with their fabulous showy blooms getting thousands of likes on Instagram.  Garden designers see this as part of the trend for bold clashing colours and thinks we should see pompom dahlias taking centre stage in planting schemes.

As well as the perfect ball shapes, dahlias come in a diverse range of shapes.  The single-flowered varieties such as the dark leaved crimson D. ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ and the delicate hot pink star like D. ‘Marie Schnugg’ have a simplicity that’s easy to incorporate into planting schemes.  Spiky cactus and anemones add some funky form and giant dinner-plate dahlias are also coming back in popularity.  

The range of colours is mouth-watering – you won’t find blue but they come in reds, purples, pinks, yellows, orange and white.  Breeders are moving away from traditional yellows and reds to more fashionable dark luscious colours such as lovely velvety Dahlia ‘Black Monarch’ as well as pastel pinks, oranges and corals, to cater for young flower arrangers.  Bi-coloured dahlias such as D. ‘A La Mode’ are also in vogue.
 
Instead of being grown together in a traditional bed to themselves, dahlias are increasingly used dotted around gardens, filling gaps left by spring flowers or in single varieties in pots.  They’re also being used in inventive complementary or harmonious colour combinations, amongst perennials and shrubs in mixed borders.  Varieties such as dark red D. ‘Arabian Nights’ also add rich blasts of colour in a tropical style planting and look great paired with larger leaves for contrast - as in Great Dixter’s Tropical Garden.

These fabulous showy flowers bring a last hurrah to the garden as other flowers start fading and will keep going well into the Autumn if you keep on top of deadheading and feed them regularly with a potash-rich feed to encourage further blooms.  The tubers should ideally be dug up after the first frost and stored somewhere over winter to be potted up in spring and put somewhere sunny inside.  But you could plant tubers deep and mulch them over winter if you live in the south and have free draining soil.