Monty shares why he can’t imagine Longmeadow without dahlias and reveals how to get the best out of these long-flowering plants
Bishop of Llandaff’ has a lot to answer for. Not so long ago, dahlias were as de rigueur as plastic gnomes and not half as ironic. They were untrendy, unfashionable and, more often than not, simply ghastly. Then along came the Bishop, with his rich alizarin robes and brilliant chrome-yellow centre. He quickly became popular among the very people who hated dahlias, setting a thoroughly bad example. Then before you could say ‘Arabian Night’ or ‘Grenadier’, dahlias started popping up all over gardens that had hitherto known better – and we had all come to just adore them.
Well, almost... not the nasty vulgar sort, of course, the dahlias that looked like a deliciously brash wedding hat, sitting over a raucous laugh, with a fag in one hand, and a gin and orange in the other. Not the dahlias that were grown with a quiet fanaticism on allotments across the country and then displayed singly, like floral haiku, in canvas marquees at late-season flower shows across the land. And not dahlias in the wrong place and not dahlias getting uppity in the border. But the right sort of dahlias – like the right sort of people, really – were such fun!
Big and bold
I grew up with dahlias. They are part of the flora of my strange childhood. My mother grew the big, cactus-flowered dahlias, all lipstick pinks, brassy yellows and shouty reds. They had their own bed next to the veg and were relegated – in a kind of apartheid, along with gladioli – to a cutting garden. Here, the soil was bare and every plant was supported by a stout square stake, of a kind we used for nothing else in the garden and that lived bundled at the back of the shed for most of the year.
These vibrant, garish flowers must have given her joy somewhere along the line, but nothing in their growing ever showed that. They were raised as a duty and their maintenance was a chore. They duly served their turn in vases and then ended on the compost heap; a slump of bedraggled petals, the remnants of a party, stained with regret.
But I grow dahlias now in my own garden with a fervour and love everything about them. We have them singly in pots, as part of big containers growing alongside cosmos, bidens, petunias and nasturtiums, and in borders. All our dahlias add immeasurably to the pleasure and beauty of the garden, and I cannot conceive of being without them.
