Bishop graces the late borders

Because the good bishop is a dahlia – and not just any dahlia, but a paeony-flowered dahlia, a truly wonderful plant for the late border.

He is not alone in bringing a glorious burst of colour to the garden; there are many forms of dahlias worthy of planting and cultivating, from the single-flowered forms through to the anemone-flowered varieties, the colarettes, decorative, ball dahlias, pompons, cactus and semi-cactus. And that’s not forgetting the bedding dahlias, which are more often grown from seed and treated as annuals.

But back to ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ who, surprisingly, is a descendant of the original dahlias, brought to Europe from their native Mexico many centuries ago.

Would we have recognised the originals as the dahlias we grow today. Unlikely, but they formed the basis for the modern varieties, much tinkered with by men and women determined to create some of the finest and most colourful flowers for autumn glory. So, we have the paeony-flowered dahlias, with their rings of flat petals surrounding the central core of stamens. More often than not, they come in orange, red or purple.

Unlike some of their cousins who demand a sheltered site to do their best, these dahlias are satisfied with an open, sunny spot in rich, well-drained soil. Plant the tubers about four inches deep and the first blooms should appear in late summer and continue until the first frosts.

Then, you can either be the laissez-faire gardener and leave the tubers in the soil to see if they can survive the winter in situ, or else lift them, clean off all the soil, and then store them somewhere frost-free and dry until they are ready to be planted out again the following late spring.

Some gardeners go a bit further because they want their tubers to flower even earlier, so they overwinter the tubers in a greenhouse and encourage early sprouting, which means that the plants are raring to grow when spring and the great outdoors beckons.

The ‘Bishop of Llandaff’, by the way, was named to honour Pritchard Hughes, Bishop of Llandaff, in Wales, in 1924, and won the RHS Award of Garden Merit in 1928.