Dark-leaved dahlias

The annual Royal Horticultural Society trial of dahlias held at Wisley is always spectacular. It includes plenty of traditional large-flowered exhibition types but increasingly features small plants with smaller flowers - more suited to containers and small mixed borders.

This year there’s quite a range of short, dark-leaved dahlias on trial and one in particular stood out – ‘Happy Single First Love’. This is one of a series of single-flowered, dark-leaved dahlias from Holland, all of which looked excellent. But the unique colour of the flowers of ‘Happy Single First Love’, set against the rich foliage, made a knockout combination.

Footnote. While bending over to photograph these dahlias my phone slipped out of my pocket. I didn’t notice till later. I went back… but what are the chances of finding a black phone amongst all that dark foliage? And I wasn’t exactly sure where I’d lost it. In fact I looked in vain for so long that I was locked in the garden after closing and had to exit through the restaurant delivery bay! Next day, I borrowed my mother’s phone and went back.

I dialled my phone up and down the delphinium trial… amongst the monardas… finally I heard my phone ringing amongst the dahlias. And there it was, caught in the bushy growth of a dark-leaved Happy dahlia. Thank goodness they hadn’t had the irrigation on.

Comments

[max]

How small is small? I'm growing Dahlias for the first time this year, and I'm quite taken with 'Bishop of Llandaff', which has maybe reached 2 feet in my garden. Seems like it would work well in a mixed border.

[digger]

Well Graham you were fortunate to recover your mobile phone in good order. Dahlias are really good performers and i think because a lot of people grow them for exhibition work we have some fantastic varieties available to us, I don't show dahlias that often but i have some spectacular plants in my garden some large cactus types are beautiful, but i prefer to have them in the garden than the show bench, a good friend of mine who is a dahlia judge told me that the showbench for dahlias is full of "venom and daggers"

[ed]

I could easily be mistaken, but I've been under the impression that the ICNCP required that a cultivar name be three or fewer words. Has the RHS accepted this as the name?

[Graham Rice]

These dahlias are not more than about 2ft tall, often less. 'Bishop of Llandaff' often gets much taller.

[Graham Rice]

You're quite right, ed, cultivar names must contain no more than three words. It turns out that the correct cv name for this plant is 'HS First Love' - in the Happy Single series. I guess that the raisers, too, must have come across this problem and adjusted the name. I see the names have also recently been amended in the RHS trials list. There is more info on them here: http://www.verwer-dahlias.com/en/hs_intro_en.htm