The Dahlia Snobs

​When I came to gardening as a complete novice I also came to gardening free from any prejudices and preconceptions.  For instance I looked at a Dahlia and thought “How beautiful’, whereas if I had been properly brought up I would have grimaced and said “How vulgar”.  I had no idea that Dahlias were considered to be gross, gaudy, garish and beyond the pale.  This last phrase is apt because in a well brought up garden pale colours such as blue, mauve, lilac and white were acceptable, but orange and red, or, heaven forbid, orange and red together, were too, too, de trop.
 
So it was that, in my complete innocence and oblivious of the sniggers of the cognoscenti, I put together a collection of brightly coloured Dahlias, blithely placing red against orange and yellow with purple.  I was lucky in two respects. First that Christopher Lloyd, who wrote a weekly column for Country Life, expressed his admiration for Dahlias and other brightly coloured tropicals and began to puncture the prejudice against them.  Secondly that the British public, perhaps following his lead, or starting a trend on their own, started to buy them and love them.  Gradually Dahlias became flowers to admire, rather than to be sneered at and this trend coincided with the growth of my passion for them in all shapes, sizes and colours.    
 
Dahlias even began to be grown in the most sophisticated of gardens, although these precious creatures kept their prejudice alive by only growing the dark-leafed ‘Bishop’ varieties.  I still love them in any shape or size, or leaf colour- the gaudier the better.  But I have kept a bed of the white variety Bishop of Dover, quite separate from the others, so that the garden snobs can enjoy and admire them, unpolluted by their gaudy cousins.

Bed of Dahlia ‘Bishop of Dover’