Open Your Garden to the Beauty of a Dahlia
One look at a dahlia, and it is hard not to fall in love with its beauty and majesty (even if you are not a flower lover!). Dahlias are beautiful, big faced flowers that can bring lots of color and life to any garden.
Dahlias are as lovely as their name suggests. A flower of true variety, dahlias grow in the colors of pink, white, red, orange and yellow, but they come in a tremendous amount of shapes and sizes.
Size Categories for Dahlias
-Giant is greater than 10 inches in diameter
-Large is 8 to 10 inches in diameter
-Medium is 6 to 8 inches in diameter
-Small is 4 to 6 inches in diameter
-Miniature is 2 to 4 inches in diameter
-Mignon is less than 2 inches in diameter
When it comes to bloom categories for dahlias, there are 11 in total. These include decorative, cactus, ball, water lily, anemone, orchid, peony, fimbriated, collarette, novelty and single.
Dahlias are very diverse flowers, which can be planted in a variety of areas of a garden and landscape with much growing success. The petals of a dahlia are a sight to behold. They can be rounded and thin or spikier in nature. Some flowers are all one color while others are a medley of two or three blended together.
Dahlias are tubers which bloom in the latter part of the summer but continue to live well into the autumn months. They prefer sandy, well-drained, humus rich soil. However, dahlias are versatile and hardy enough to handle most types of soil. If you plant them in soil that has a high concentration of clay, then it is recommended that you add a little bit of peat moss or sand to it in order to make it lighter.
Dahlias like the sun, but they also do well in cooler (not cold) temperatures when there is an adequate amount of rainfall. This explains why they can handle autumn so well. In fact, dahlias generally become more pronounced and brilliant in their appearance the cooler the weather gets. This is helped along by them being deadheaded and pinched as required.
While dahlias are generally grown as annuals, they can be grown as perennials if the tubers are dug up very soon after the first frost of the season.
