Lead us not into temptation

 

The seed catalogues arrived before the old year was out.  Fortunately I’m on the mailing list of only a couple of companies, plus a couple more online, and temptation was limited by the fact that I had already ordered and received my seeds (from Dobies) in the autumn.  I was very good this year and didn’t get too carried away with the size of my order (though I still have a lot of seeds to sow!).  Last year I sowed way too many seeds, especially of flowering plants, and ended up throwing a lot of them away – but that’s maybe a story for another blog post.

Seed temptation

However I did have a rueful laugh at myself while reading Jack Wallington’s recent blog post (My self-help guide to resisting seed and plant catalogue order overload | Jack Wallington Garden Design Ltd. - Clapham in London) about the dangers of the seed catalogues.  Oh yes, Jack, and me too.  The big problem with the mid-winter catalogues is that they include the dahlia tubers.  Now that is – for me, as well as for Jack – a serious temptation.

Dahlia temptation ('David Howard' bottom left)

I came relatively late to dahlias, but they have become the mainstay of my late summer garden.  They can be left in the ground over winter, with sufficient protection, but I’ve always dug them up and overwintered them under cover, mostly because I don’t have a dedicated place for them in the garden and I like to be able to move them from one spot – or from one pot – to another from year to year.  They do take up quite a lot of space – some dahlias can get quite big – and they need sun, which isn’t in plentiful supply in my plot.  They’re also quite time-consuming; digging them up, drying them off, shaking off the soil, storing them, planting them up, hardening them off and then putting them outside again is a bit of a rigmarole.  I have four varieties (the dark red single ‘Bishop of Auckland’, even darker red ‘Sam Hopkins’, purple ‘Ambition’ and the giant cream ‘Café au Lait’), and several tubers of each as they divide naturally after a while in storage; plus my collection of seed-grown ‘Bishop’s Children’, offspring of dahlias in the Bishop series; they don’t come true from seed, but they all share the Bishops’ open, single flowers and dark foliage.  That’s quite a lot of dahlias, and I don’t need (or have space for) any more.

But then the Sarah Raven catalogue comes…. and it’s my downfall, as well as Jack’s.

I have resisted for the past couple of years.  My last acquisition, ‘Dark Butterfly’, died on me without flowering a few years back, which dented my enthusiasm, and the labour-intensiveness of them also put me off adding to my collection.  However I’m thinking of finding a place for at least some of them in the veg plot, and leaving them there next winter, which will reduce the workload; and then I received a letter from Sarah Raven (not from her personally, you understand, but from the company).  They’ve had a spot of bother with their transfer to a new warehouse which has affected deliveries, and in compensation they would like to offer me (and thousands of others, no doubt) a £10 voucher.

Well, it would seem churlish to decline, wouldn’t it?  This is a good year to order more dahlias, I tell myself; mail-order dahlias are sent out in February, when we’re usually away on holiday, but this winter all travel is stopped by the virus, and we shall be here to take delivery of them and ensure that they don’t spend time sitting around somewhere inappropriate waiting for our return.  Dahlias will be some compensation for not skiing this year.

So, what to choose?  One advantage of the Sarah Raven catalogue – and here I’m being quite serious – is that they sell dahlia tubers singly, whereas most companies sell them in packs of three or even five (and if I have trouble finding space for more, finding space for three or five is an even bigger problem).  I forced myself to go for only two, and spend the rest of the £10 (ok, and a bit more, and plus p&p of course) on a pack of Lilium regale, for a potful of scent on the patio earlier in the summer.

As I’ve already said more than once in this blog, I’ve particularly enjoyed my Bishop’s Children this year, and the colour mix – mostly red and orange – has been given some real zing by the inclusion of two with pinkish flowers.  Those two plants died back earlier than the others, and the tubers, when dug up, turned out to be on the small side, so I’m not sure whether they will survive.  They looked like offspring of pink ‘Bishop of Canterbury’, so I’ve gone for a tuber of the real ‘B of C’ to be sure of keeping the colour mix in the garden.  For the other, I’ve ordered the classic orange ‘David Howard’, whom I’ve had my eye on for a while; he also has well-coloured foliage, bronze rather than the bishops’ purplish tone.

All I have to do now is find room for them … and hope that they don’t send another voucher next year....

More temptation ....