I revamped the stakes in the dahlia bed today, six new ones from the garden centre and a seventh recycled from a young orange-twigged lime tree which had grown enough for the stake to be surplus to requirements. I was amazed that the tip of the last hadn't rotted off, and that I was able to wriggle it free of the ground without breaking it by rocking it gently but firmly until I could slide it out of its by then V shaped hole. I painted all of them in cheerful shades of red, orange and yellow, left them to dry and banged them in. Job done, and while I was at it I used up the left-over paint (until I ran out of yellow) repainting some of the existing stakes.
The coloured stakes started as a sort of jeu d'esprit, adapted from an entirely serious show garden I saw in an article about an avant garde French garden festival. That had an array of stakes, blue on one side and I think a contrasting colour on other sides, so that the effect would change as you walked around them, all hammered in dead square. I wasn't aiming at anything so sophisticated. Hammering stakes into our stony ground so that they remained perfectly upright and rigidly aligned along any given axis would take so long that I really couldn't be bothered.
The need for stakes only gradually dawned on me. Dahlias are not intrinsically floppy, but do tend to blow over. I began by messing around with bamboo canes, but they were not up to the weight of the dahlias in full growth, so I began to use small square profile tree stakes. Most of the National Trust gardens with dedicated dahlia beds that I've visited use something similar, choosing stakes that are slightly shorter than the mature height of the dahlias, and leaving them a subfusc shade of brown. You could say that my decision to use much taller stakes, up to twice the height of the dahlias and thick enough to support a young tree, and paint them brightly was poking fun at the whole convention of invisible staking, an art that's dutifully explained every year in gardening columns as regularly as the features on how to ring the changes with your Christmas lunch that get trotted out each December. You could, but in truth the project is not that cerebral. The oversized red and orange stakes are simply a bit of fun, a splash of colour in winter that coordinates with the tulips, the dahlias and the sunflowers in spring and summer.
I use a basic artist's acrylic paint. The cheapest place to get it in Colchester seems to be The Range. Today's efforts used up the whole of a 250 ml pot of Cadmium yellow, and most of a pot of Cadmium red. It will flake and fade a little over time, but about that much effort on new stakes and paint every couple of years is enough to keep the effect going. The main issue is the stakes rotting through below ground level, which is the inevitable fate of buried softwood, pressure treated or not, and is in any case what tree stakes are supposed to do, in case nobody remembers to remove them.
The dahlias are all in shades of yellow, orange and red, though the red varieties never seem to last as well as the others. There are orange pot marigolds that seed themselves from year to year, and parsley that originally escaped from the herb bed. Parsley foliage is quite ornamental, if you forget about it being a herb and look at it objectively, so I leave it to get on with it. I've got some sunflower seeds to plant, and am going to experiment with Tithonia this year, though the bed may be too dry for them, and I've read that they only put on a good show if they get plenty of sun, being complete duds in dull summers. I've got a few castor oil plants coming on in the greenhouse as well. An amber flowered honeysuckle and the bright red rose 'Chevy Chase' grow up the trellis at the end of the bed in front of the greenhouse, and I've got the perennial nasturtium 'Ken Aslet' on order, hoping that this will be third time lucky. So far I've tried one in the ground, which died very quickly, and one in a pot, which met a lingering end, sending out weedy and totally non-flowering foliage for several years, until I gave up (or perhaps it did).
I think I see a window of opportunity before the dahlias really get going, and am going to add some red and orange oriental poppies I grew from a couple of packets of free seed. They are nice healthy plants, and I couldn't think what to do with them, then my eye fell upon the blank space of the dahlia bed. Oriental poppies die down after flowering and seem quite happy sharing their quarters with late season performers. In the back garden I've got some among the perennial peas, and both are still alive and well after a couple of years of cohabitation. I've toyed with the idea of buying some red and yellow plastic windmills from the beach shops at Clacton, but have resisted so far. At the moment the dahlia bed is gaudy, but it stops just this side of kitsch.
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