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Gardening and lifestyle expert P. Allen Smith shares his knowledge on dahlias. This video is from season 11 of his public television series, P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home.
As a garden designer, I’ve learned to appreciate the power of big, bold flowers in a flower border, and that’s exactly what we have here. Just look at these dahlias. Aren’t they spectacular? The color is so rich. But more than that, it’s the shape and form, the boldness of the flower itself that serves as a contrast to other flowers here in this border. Just take, for instance, the dahlia as compared to its companion here, this beautiful Achillea. Its common name is Yarrow, and you can see that the color resonates beautifully with the color of these dahlias. Other flowers in this border in the same color family include daylilies and black-eyed Susan’s. So you can kind of see what I’m saying, this contrast of bloom shape sets up visual interest in a flower border, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a flower bed of this size or even a container. The same principle works.

Now, dahlias are very good value. They’re grown from a tuber, and there are lots of different varieties both in terms of the shape of the flower and the size of the plant. Let’s take size of plant, for instance. You can start with the lowest dwarf varieties that will grow up to about a foot to 18 inches tall, all the way up to some of these big dinner plate dahlias like this that can– well, these are well over 4 feet, but some can get up to 6 and 7 feet, depending on where you live. Let’s go back to flower shape for just a moment. There is a wide range of them, from shaggy cactus-like blooms to these much more compact pompoms. Now, take this garden, for instance. The theme here is clearly white. Look at all of these big drifts of white dahlias that punctuate the four quadrants of this space. Some of the companion plants to the dahlias include lamb’s ear, a shaggy Shasta daisy, as well as this beautiful statuesque phlox called David. Now, we’ve certainly seen how beautiful …