Can you grow dahlias from seed?

Listen to this episode to have all your questions answered about growing dahlias from seed including how to collect the seeds, how to store the seeds and when to sow the seeds. Want to know if they will bloom in the first year and whether they’ll come back next year - this is the podcast episode for you.

Meet the expert with the plant story: Philippa Stewart

Philippa is the dahlia farmer who can answer all of our questions. She found she was disappointed by her garden in the late summer, when after the Spring and early Summer display of flowers there seemed to be no colour left. Then a friend bought her two dahlias. Philippa couldn’t believe the way they started to bloom in August and carried on through September into October only finishing with the first frosts. What a fabulous plant - she was hooked. The next year she grew 70 different varieties!

She started her @justdahlia account on Instagram so she could post pictures of her blooms and share her excitement with other people all over the world who too love dahlias.

In this episode Philippa shares her knowledge and guides you through the whole process of collecting dahlia seed and sowing it. She also shares how she now drys many of her dahlias supplying them to florists all over the country

A golden rule of gardening I was told by my mother-in-law, don't grow anything you don't like because you won't look after it and then you'll feel wretched as it dies in the corner of the flower bed.

And if you can’t get enough of her story then listen to a bonus episode from April when you can hear more about growing dahlias from seed. Below are some of Philippa’s unique seedlings with their beautiful blooms. And also her dried dahlias.

Meet the Floral Designer

Leigh Chappell is a florist and the co-curator of the Strawberry Hill Flower Festival with her colleague Janne Ford. Their focus is on sustainable floristry and they say that at the end of the festival nothing will be left but a compost heap. The theme this year is ‘nature unbound’ and the festival takes place from Friday 13th to Sunday 15th September. There are not only the incredible installations at Strawberry Hill house (Twickenham, London) but workshops too. Booking is advisable.

I took these photographs when I met Leigh at Strawberry Hill back in April. She gave me a tour of the house so I could see where the floral designers will be building their installations and we bumped in Henck Röling, a Dutch Master florist who along with his colleague Yan Skates will be creating “something amazing in the horseshoe” in front of the mansion. I am very excited to see what they create.

In this episode of the podcast you can hear how Leigh works with Philippa to show off her dahlias to their very best. One year that meant filling an entire staircase with blooms. This year Leigh will be showing off Philippa’s very special unique blooms that have been grown from seed.

Learn how to grow dahlias from seed

September - now is the time to harvest your seed:

So all you do for collecting seed, if you want to do what I do, which is I allow the bees to do the pollinating, so just don't dead-head it. So leave the flower on the bloom. It will take four to six weeks to develop into a seed head. And these are all seed heads. Now, I have also found that if I've got towards the frost date, once a dahlia plant is hit by the frost, it will annihilate the seed head, it will ruin the plant. So you want to make sure that you've collected your seed heads before the frost comes.

How do you store your seeds

If I've harvested the seed heads from the plant, I usually put them in jam jars with the name of the variety where I've harvested the seed from, just because I like to know that kind of thing. So I will just store it somewhere frost free and it's just where you would normally choose to store seeds. And I don't do anything with them all winter.

When do I sow them?

Here in Cheshire in the UK I treat them like half hardy annuals so I don't sow those until the beginning of April. I previously tried sowing some of the daily seeds in sort of February but I don’t use heat here and I don't want to use artificial heat I like the natural order of things so the best time for me to sow here in Cheshire is towards the end of March beginning of April and I get really good germination rate there and the great thing about growing from seed is daily seedlings are very very rampant they just want to grow so they really do grow very quickly.

Will they bloom in the first year?

Yes and it's a different growing experience because with dahlias that you grow from tubers, we do this thing called pinching out which helps produce a branching..a nice plant habit, as it were. But with seedlings, because the name of the game is you just want them to reveal themselves and show themselves as a flower, you don't even need to pinch out. You can just let them bolt, produce their flower, and you think, yes, I love it, or no, I don't. But as I say, it's like children, you end up loving them all.

Good luck with collecting seed and if you want to hear more about how Philippa grows her seedlings listen to this bonus episode from April this year.

Transcript

00:02. Welcome to our plant stories and one of my all-time favourite flowers, Dahlia's, which also as it happens links to one of my very early plant memories and an aunt and uncle who had a small holding and one of the things they farmed were Dahlia's. This is one of those plant stories where a passion for a plant just grows and grows.

I thought well I could dig up part of the field and make more daily beds in there. And I never intended filling the area but it's a bit like a handbag isn't it, you know, no matter what you think, oh well I could put five 25 metre beds in here but I'll maybe only fill two, well no of course within a couple of years I'd filled all five.

But it's also about the relationship between those who grow the flowers and the creators who design using the flowers.

00:52 For me it's like looking at a range of paints that you can choose the colours because there are so many of them and also lots of different shapes and sizes. So to make a composition with those is just an absolute joy for me.

And of course we'll be learning from all that expertise on how we too can grow more dahlias. The inspiration for this plant story goes back a year, when separately two friends contacted me and said, can you get to the Strawberry Hill Flower Festival? There must be amazing plant stories here. Sadly, I couldn't, but I made a mental note to find out more. And when I talked to Lee Chappell and Jan Ford, who are the floral designers behind this festival, they led me to our plant story.

01:50 So I'm Philippa Stewart of Just Dahlia's. And I suppose I'm a flower farmer. Does that best describe what I do? Yes, and I'm passionate about dahlias, so I grow dahlias as cut flowers for fresh and dried. So a plant story. Tell me your plant story about dahlias. Where does it start? How do you become a dahlias farmer? I suppose like most people, I got all excited in spring and I filled my garden with all these spring plants and I suddenly found I got to July and the garden looked like it needed to be put to bed for the winter. And I literally had no flowers. July, all the green was gone from that lovely bright, lovely luscious green to a dark green and no flowers. So somebody did say to me, well, have you thought about dahlias? But my only experience of seeing dahlias were the kind of thing that you see in the garage forecourt where they're I think it's called Edinburgh the purple and white one which I absolutely loathe. Or the large acid yellow big-headed dahlias that the exhibition growers are so amazing at growing but it wasn't my vision for what I wanted in the garden. However this friend bought me a couple of dahlias and so I thought well I'll stick with it and pop them in the garden.

03:07 I couldn't believe that from one plant you could get non-stop flowers with minimal effort. Okay, all you have to do is a bit of deadheading, maybe a bit of feeding, and they would flower non-stop from August through September through October right up to the frost. So three months of flower. And I'm Northern, so I like value for money. So that to me was just, wow, this is incredible. And then when I started looking into it and I realized there are thousands and thousands and thousands of different dahlias regardless, even if they don't like dahlias, there is a dahlias for somebody because there are just so many different shapes and sizes that you can't imagine.

03:50 So I was blown away and the area that we're standing in at the moment is our orchard we called it because it's called Fruit Tree's and I have a small vegetable garden in here and I used to grow vegetables in there and as often happens with vegetable growing you'd always find you just as you go away on holiday you'd have all the carrots ready all the courgettes ready oh so instead of having a glut of vegetables once I found out about all the different dahlias that were available I thought well actually maybe I'll just grow cut flowers in the vegetable garden this year because having a glut of flowers is much nicer than having a glut of courgettes.

I couldn't agree more actually. How big is that veg patch do you reckon?

I think I would say it was eight meters by 24 something like that. I know I've paced it at some point it might not be as much as 20 it might be 20 eight by 20 something like that I grow sweet peas around the outside of it and I can get a 25 meter sweet pea net down the side and up the other end. Okay, okay. So that's about the right size. And it's arranged in a pretty sort of diamond shape, the beds inside, they're all raised beds. 

05:10 So I calculated that I'd be able to grow about 60 or 70 dahlias in there. So at the time, the National Dahlias Collection sold router cuttings. Unfortunately, they don't at the moment. I think they may do again in the future, but they don't at the moment. And they just had thousands of varieties. So the problem was getting your shopping basket down to a reasonable number that, you know, I think I started with 150 and knew that I had a maximum space for about 70.

05:37. Hang on, so you went from just a couple of dahlias, thinking these are lovely, to over a hundred? To maybe seventy, that first year, just to go in this area here. They really inspired you? Oh, well it was just the fact that, as I say, the National Dahlias Collection, they had this fantastic website, you just scroll through, just going through A, it might take me a couple of hours, and all the different shapes and sizes and colours, and I was like, oh well I've got to grow that one, I've got to grow that one, you know, so I just started with the 70 and that year, I'd just got into Instagram and I knew I was boring my friends to death with pictures of flowers. So I thought, well, maybe I'll start a public Instagram site and slightly nervous about that because I'm the kind of person who, you know, told their children, oh, don't go on the internet. So I thought, well, I'll just see, I'll start this public Instagram site and I'll put Just Dahlias on it. Oh, in fact, I'll call it Just Dahlias and see if there are any other people out there who like dahlias. And of course it just opened a whole can of worms because I had no idea that lots and lots of, not everybody, but lots and lots of people are absolutely hooked by dahlias as well. And within a very short space of time I was talking to people all over the world which was magic and I have to say Instagram from that point of view, connecting people and providing you with a shared platform to discuss your passions. Oh, absolutely unbelievable. And it's that real specialism, isn't it? You're able to just talk daily as well. Perhaps members of your family might slightly glaze over, but you found someone who shares that. Exactly, exactly. And they don't, and as I say to people, Oh, you make me feel normal now because they had the same kind of, Oh my God, this and have you seen this one and have you seen that one and so it was it was very eye-opening and a lovely thing to do.

07:28. So I got to maybe the end of August that year and realised I was drowning in flowers and so there were only 70 plants in there but literally I was giving buckets away of flowers. I couldn't have enough space in the house to put all the flowers that were coming. So I suddenly thought well I wonder if somebody actually wants to buy them because if somebody wants to buy the flowers I can buy more dahlias. So it was a way of funding the obsession. So I literally I packed up the car, I just did random buckets of flowers, put them all in the boot of the car and I drove to my local town and it was when I opened the boot and there's a lady, a florist called Bridget and when I opened the boot and she went and I thought oh I think I might be onto something here and then I've no Floristry background at all and from talking to Bridget she was explaining how dahlias that they order would normally order in from say Holland, they arrive so badly bruised and they don't like being out of water so that's the main problem when you're shipping them between countries. So she was saying, well if I could have a local source that obviously I can deliver in water as it were, so then yes she would love to use them because they're the perfect event flower, they fill a room with colour and shape vibrancy so easily. So that's how I thought. Oh and I think I sold 20 pounds worth of flowers that year and I thought, oh this is it, I'm off, I'm off. You calculated how many dailies you could buy with that. Yeah exactly, I thought right that's fantastic.

08:58 How did you move from buckets of dahlias that florists will want to buy and use and in this or we'll want to put in jugs and vases to drying them. How did that happen for you?

Right, that was, well that was interesting because no matter how much I cut the flowers, bearing in mind that I always wanted this tiny business to only be for me. So I didn't, I know I'm getting more help now, but I didn't really want to have to employ anybody. It was something for me to do. It was my passion and I'm a bit of a control freak, so is everybody going to plant it just as I wanted? I'm not sure. So, but so that the number of customers I can have is limited on my time. So I still had excess flowers. So that's when I thought, oh, I wonder if I could dry them. And that's as I said to you earlier, I hung a few up in the kitchen and was rather embarrassed by them thinking, oh, people think, God, don't be ridiculous. Of course you can't dry dahlias. They're far too fleshy, they're not going to work are they? But I just couldn't believe the results they were well in my view they were absolutely beautiful and then the drying process brings a shape and a texture that's unbelievably different and very beautiful and I was also told oh by the way the whites won't dry well I found the whites dry beautifully and when we go in later I'll hopefully I'll be able to show you and so this was suddenly oh this I think I'm loving.

10:45. And I think with all things in the garden you've got to do what you love. You know, there's always, that was a golden rule of gardening I was told by my mother-in-law, don't grow anything you don't like because you won't look after it and then you'll feel wretched as it dies in the corner of the flower bed. So that is such good advice. Yeah, don't you think? Yes, I really do. I don't know about you but I've even chosen the weakling tomato plants thinking no this year it's your turn. It is, it's your turn. You've got to grow what you love.

11:27 And as I say, the drying, well, the other thing is, I'm quite a nervy person, I don't know if you can tell. Actually growing cut flowers is quite stressful and I thought I would get less stressed about it as I got more experience but actually I got more stressed about it because do you have 200 white dahlias on Thursday? I'd spend a week of sleepless nights thinking what's the weather doing blah blah blah. Do you have 200 dried white dahlias? Well it's a yes or a no because I'm selling from stock and also I find that my customers because they have more time as well, the whole experience is less stressy. And actually I have a very lovely working relationship with my dry customers where they will now say to me, oh, it's this sort of color palette, what do you think? And I'll literally be running around the house going, well, I've got this and I've got that. And what do you think about these two together? And we'll lay them out on the table. All this is via WhatsApp, the wonders of WhatsApp, modern technology, together with a collection based on what they can see from all the photographs.

12:27 What do you love about dahlias?

Oh God, all the different shapes and variety and they are the gift that keeps giving because I've found from working with them it's not just the dahlias from tubers, it's the drying, it's the growing from seed,with the seedlings, the thing there, it doesn't matter to me if they don't flower until later on. All they need to do is flower once to show themselves because it is a bit like having children when they do show themselves you think well you're not the best but actually you are quite nice and also that the reason I've got into the seedlings is because everybody can grow dahlias, that's wonderful, but the seedlings produces unique plants. So what I want to do is produce my own unique series of dahlias. And with a view, always with the end game is for drying those dahlias. So when you're growing from seed, there are dominant traits. For instance, the color yellow tends to be quite a dominant trait. Well, for me, when I'm drying, lots of gardeners are a bit iffy about yellow. I don't know why, but when they're dried, yellow often goes to a most fantastic gold colour, it can reveal itself in all sorts of other ways. So my end game is will it be good as a dried flower? Not necessarily is it perfect? Is it is the head at 45 degrees to the stem? I am not a professional grower. There are professional growers out there who I absolutely take my hat off to but my end game is slightly different. I want to create a unique set of flowers that you can't get anywhere else.

14:15 Hold that thought about those unique flowers. Philippa now has hundreds and hundreds of blooms, but...

I have absolutely no interest in arranging them myself. I know it sounds a bit strange, but then somebody likened me the other day to a baker. You know, I'm producing the bread, and now I want somebody else to go off and do something lovely with the bread.

Enter floral designer Leigh Chappell. I mentioned Strawberry Hill at the start of this episode. It's a large Gothic villa in London built in 1749 for Horace Warpole. And that is where Philippa took her bread.

15:00 So Leigh, I know that you and Philippa have worked together before. You did an installation on the staircase using Philippa's dahlias at Strawberry Hill. Tell me more how that came about, how you worked together, how you planned it, and actually just how you even built it, frankly. I've seen that staircase, so I have a vision of you kind of abseiling somehow down the banisters.

Well, what actually happened was that somebody else had been due to do the staircase, but had to pull out a short notice. And Philippa and I were chatting and we were saying, oh my God, what are we gonna do? And Philippa said, well, I have got all these dahlias. And for me, that was very exciting, very, very exciting. So Philippa basically went and picked one of each of her dahlias in the color palette that we were talking about. And we, by Zoom, went through each of the shapes and colours, which was lovely. As I say, it's like painting with flowers. And then lo and behold, once we'd chosen all the specimens that we thought would work, Philippa drove down the motorway with her people mover absolutely packed to the gunnels of Dahlia's and arrived with his car busting full and yeah, then we installed them. And basically we built a sort of structure of vases and put them straight into these cylindrical glass vases. So you couldn't really see the glass, but the dahlias were what you really saw. So yeah, this sort of structure, this combination of vases was built up all the way up the stairs and along the landings. And yes, going up to the top of the house.

Can I interject there and say that on the day when Leigh phoned me and said, would I consider taking part in the Strawberry Hill Flower Festival? I was shaking with excitement. As I've said to you before, Sally, I feel I'm very much a grower. I feel I once I've got my flowers in a bucket that I feel I've done my job and then I get very excited to see what people do with them. So the thought of Leigh Chappell and Janne Ford using my flowers at Strawberry Hill, it was beyond exciting. Then it was terrifying because I said to Leigh, well what sort of colours do you want? And Leigh said, well whatever you've got we'll work with. Well that was like, oh my god, where do I start?

So I did, like you say, we had that day and it was chucking it down with rain. I don't know if you remember, but I remember. I do. Me running up and down the flower beds and you and Janne going, yes, oh, stop there, that one, that one, and I took one of those and then I took all the ones that you'd selected and laid them out on the floor in the garage. And then we had one of these glorious sessions, which I love, of, ooh move top left out. Right now bottom right into yes, that one and eventually we ended up with this selection which was just …I mean I could never have come up with that selection.

I'm sure you could.

No I really don't think I could, I’d have been overwhelmed with the choice whereas you and Janne just had this vision and that and that for me is where the excitement is the seeing what can be done with the flowers and an opportunity, because they're so precious to me, an opportunity for them to be shown off in their best possible way and I remember walking in when you and Janet finished the staircase and just thinking wow, wow, that is something.

My favourite one of that whole display were those little, just ‘Josudi’ what were they called?

‘Josudi Mercury.’

19:15 That's right. Still my favourite. Yeah, yeah. And you had it just, just lolling out of the alcove halfway up the stairs. And it just showed it off so beautifully. And honestly, I was brimming with pride. I really was.

Well, we loved them. We loved them.

So it sounds like you create Leigh, you see the flowers and then you're almost painting a picture in your head. So that when those flowers appear, you kind of already know where they're going to go because you've mapped it out in your mind. You've seen the shapes, the colours, the way the tones will change. You've seen all of that.

Yes, yeah. That is, I must admit that sometimes, you know, you can order flowers and not be absolutely sure what you're getting, but that time spent with on Zoom looking at each particular bloom that was priceless.

You've touched on it a bit, Philippa, but I think from both of you, I'm interested in, we think of, sometimes we, and I've talked to florists before, but there feels to me like what you see at Strawberry Hill is something extraordinary. It's installations and that's different, isn't it?

Sure is, yes. Yes, it's not. I guess the thing is a lot of people will have in their heads at a flower festival is maybe like church plinths or that kind of thing because that's what flower festivals used to be. Having grown up around the churches, I suppose they started. But installations these days, florestry is much more experimental than it used to be and moves into the fine art kind of spectrum to an extent, along with the commercial side of things. And I think certainly shops and places, you know, large places, they commission floral installations to wow the crowds and create a mood which is very successful. And so majority-wise, I think the other end of the spectrum, the people who...buy flowers once a week and are used to walking into Tesco's and seeing a little bunch of Alstromeria or whatever, to be able to wander into Strawberry Hill House and see some of that in the setting. They are quite big installations. There are some small ones as well, but yeah, there are quite a few large full-on installations with quite different influences behind them.

22:02. Philippa, have you got any flowers, any of your dahlias going to Strawberry Hill this year?

Well, yes, hopefully. I think Leigh and I have provisionally talked about using some of my seedlings because those will be completely unique. They won't exist anywhere else in the world. So that would be quite nice. And I think Leigh, you talked about doing a... is it Kenzan? Is that? No. Ikebana. Ikebana. That's the word I was looking for. Sorry.

Ikebana is the Japanese art of flower arranging. It actually means to make flowers come alive. So we're going to do something with Philippa's seedling flowers, flowers from seedling. And because they're so special in a way, enhancing them, giving each little bloom its own space and yeah, make an arrangement to sort of express that special feeling.

I'm excited that this year I will go to Strawberry Hill and see the incredible floral installations and talk to Leigh Chappell and Janne Ford about their vision for this festival. I know they have said that at the end nothing will be left but a compost heap. So listen out for that offshoot episode. We of course always end our plant stories by learning more about growing the plant.

What would your advice be to somebody who's in September looking at dahlias thinking I really want to grow more next year what would your advice be to them?

Well one thing you could be thinking about is saving your own seed and now it's very important to know that for a dahlia to actually produce seed it takes a great deal of energy from the plant so for instance when I'm saving seed I've got some varieties that I know I can't get hold of anymore because that particular nursery is closed down and I've never seen them anywhere else. There's two varieties called ‘Jean Fairs’ and ‘Pink Jean Fairs’ and they're absolutely fantastic dahlias. And I would like to collect seed from them. But I know that the process of them producing seed does detract from their producing good tubers. So on those particular plants, I will only let one or two flowers, maybe three go to seed in the whole season. I'm not prepared to risk it with that particular variety. But I don't know whether I could let six go to seed, for instance. But because I can't afford to lose that variety, I'm not prepared to risk it. What I do with other varieties, so for instance, ‘Jesudi Mercury’, which is the most fantastic cactus-style dahlia, I know I can easily get hold of that from Halls of Heddon, who are my top supplier, by the way. And also, incidentally, also open their books for orders for next year in September. So if you are looking at your dahlias and you've had a bad growing season, now is the time to get onto the two main suppliers that I like to use, Halls of Headon and Gilbert's Dahlias down south. And also by supporting these British growers we're going to keep those old varieties going, so they're my top suppliers, but as I say they open their order books for the following year in September. So you can look around your plot and think, oh, maybe I need a white water lily and you can go onto their websites and find a new variety for you. So for instance, if I was collecting seed, we're talking about the seed production, I might also have a sacrificial plant. So, ‘Jesudi Mercury’ or for instance, ‘Cafe au Lait’. I grow lots of ‘Cafe au Lait’ and I've got lots of ‘Cafe au Lait’ tubers.

25:44 I'm fine with knowing that if I let a whole plant go to seed, so in one season I don't cut any of the flowers off it at all and only collect seed heads from it, then at the end of that season I actually discard that tuber. To me there's no point in wasting time wondering whether it's going to come back okay next year. I may as well just throw it away because I know I've got plenty of other tubers. But as I say on the varieties where I'm a bit worried about them not being able to resource them. So all you do for collecting seed, if you want to do what I do, which is I allow the bees to do the pollinating, is just don't dead-head it. So leave the flower on the bloom. It will take four to six weeks to develop into a seed head. And these are all seed heads. Now, I have also found that if I've got towards the frost date, once a dahlia plant is hit by the frost, it will annihilate the seed head, it will ruin the plant. So you want to make sure that you've collected your seed heads before the frost comes. So these, actually, I collected the seed heads. What happens is the flower will open and set its pollen. The bees will do the pollinating. And once it's set its pollen that is a trigger for the flower to then start shedding its petals and you'll notice that the the flower will shed its petals and then what happens is I don't know what the technical name is for the back petals but they sort of close round to the front of the plant and make a very cone-shaped seed head and that tends to be green and sometimes it has like a black centre so you might think it's gone mouldy but it hasn't and there's a lot of moisture in there as well so you need that all to dry out.

But I have found that you can also, if I've collecting seed heads towards the end of the season, I've been able to cut those, bring them into the kitchen, put them in say a centimeter of water in a jam jar or on my kitchen window sill, and they dry out to be like this. And then you can collect the seed later. And sometimes I'll leave them like that for months.

So these are tiny little kind of blooms aren't they? They look like they've been opened up as these rather beautifully look gorgeous dried actually. Yes. But these are your seed heads. Yes. I should take a picture for this as well. And you can see the seeds in there. Oh wow.

The Dahlia seeds are the large black things inside so they're very easy to harvest. So if you'd left it on the plant, you might leave it until you think the frost is going to come. You could leave it or would you normally think hmmm? Well I keep an eye on it as well because if it dries out too much it's going to do what this is doing which is opening and starting to drop its petals, drop its seeds. So you want to get it before, I mean it will dry to this stage on the plant if it's had long enough and so you want to get it before it starts dropping its seed on the floor so you can harvest it yourself.

You've really got to watch for the right moment basically.

Yes. Yeah, but you've got plenty of time. Don't worry, if you go away for a week, it's not suddenly gonna disappear or whatever. And I find the best way of harvesting the seed is in like a shoe box. And then that way, because they're, well, you can see the seeds are actually quite big aren't they? That's the seed there. Oh yes, it's not like a kind of tiny radish seed. No, no, no, no. You can really see that. Yeah, they're not tiny, tiny. No. Oh, it's dropped now. Yeah. Those are seeds there. So they're about what, three, three, no five four no more than that six millimeters by one millimeter yeah so they're a decent size you can see them yeah yeah so and I've got hands the size of shovels so that they're meant they meant I've always struggled with tiny tiny seeds so obviously another indication that Dahlias were meant for me because I can manage them with my huge great big shovel hands so yes so that's I would recommend that you know just keeping an eye on this on your seed heads waiting for them button-shaped flower bud is completely different from a cone-shaped seed head.

How long do I keep them for and when can I plant them?

So I would then, if I've harvested the seed heads from the plant, I usually put them in jam jars, this one hasn't, but jam jars with the name of the variety where I've harvested the seed from, just because I like to know that kind of thing. So I will just store or outbuilding. It is frost free and it's just where you would normally choose to store seeds. And I don't do anything with them all winter and then here in Cheshire in the UK I treat them like half hardy annuals so I don't sow those until the beginning of April. I previously sowed some of the, tried sowing some of the daily seeds in sort of February but I don’t use heat here and I don't want to use artificial heat I like the natural order of things so the best time for me to sow here in Cheshire is towards the end of March beginning of April and I get really good germination rate there and the great thing about growing from seed is daily seedlings are very very rampant they just want to grow so they really do grow very quickly and the other great thing which is a sustainability issue people who grow dahlias will be aware that they do tend to suffer from viruses and those viruses get transmitted from tuba to tuba so if you are buying in tubas then you do also stand a chance of bringing in viruses. However, dahlias viruses do not get transmitted by seed with the exception of one. Research has shown that if you're growing first year seedlings, your daily seedlings will be virus free with the exception of one particular virus. So it's good from that point of view. You are guaranteeing that you have a clean patch as it were.

And they will bloom in that first year?

Yes, yeah. And it's, again, it's a different growing experience because with dahlias that you grow from tubers, we do this thing called pinching out which helps produce a branching..a nice plant habit, as it were. But with seedlings, because the name of the game is you just want them to reveal themselves and show themselves as a flower, you don't even need to pinch out. You can just let them bolt, produce their flower, and you think, yes, I love it, or no, I don't. But as I say, it's like children, you end up loving them all. So the culling is very, very difficult. I tend to find, actually...the thing that really does dictate whether I don't keep a seedling is the plant habit. So if it's lolling all over the floor and it's just going to get munched by the slugs, then it's no good to me because the plant will probably get decimated by slugs anyway, so I wouldn't be able to dry it. So that can have a big contributing factor. But as soon as it's revealed itself, then I may be tending it slightly more carefully to make sure I get as many blooms as possible from it.

32:58 I really hope that Philippa has inspired some of you with her passion for dahlias. I had such a lovely time meeting her and seeing her garden, so do check out the bonus episode from April if you want to hear more about her work. Our Plant Stories is an independent podcast presented and produced by me, Sally Flatman.