From Chapter 13 of The Dahlia Handbook: Breeding Dahlias
An excerpt:
First-year seedlings don’t care what you had in mind. They throw every tone and form into the mix. Singles, collarettes, ragged anemone centers, stars, soft blushes, loud reds, tea-stained yellows you’ve never seen before. It’s like letting a toddler loose with a fistful of paintbrushes, splashing color across the field in splotches, streaks, and unexpected blends no sane gardener would dare put in a spreadsheet. The tones clash and complement in ways you couldn’t choreograph if you tried. Deep, inky purples lean into coppery oranges, soft pastels sidle up to wild magentas, and every step feels like stumbling onto a new gift for the senses. Some growers plant by color or form, neat and regimented, which makes sense if you’re cataloging or planning a harvest. But a seedling field refuses order. It’s chaos that somehow works – a living, breathing palette, refreshed every morning in late July and August, when the next surprise blooms overnight.
The first blooms might not be what you hoped for, often an early string of singles when you wanted anemones. That’s when it hits you: these faces carry distant echoes of their wild ancestors, shaped not only by the mountains and valleys of Mexico but also by the hands of Indigenous growers who selected and crossed them long before Europeans gave them fancy names. They owe you nothing. It’s a genetic middle finger to centuries of human meddling, and it’s worth revering. Those open centers pull in the pollinators, and the pollinators lift the whole field. A “non keeper” is not a mistake, it’s a memory, here to remind you what a dahlia really is.
Stay in it long enough and the pull of this chaos changes you. Neat rows of perfect doubles start to feel sterile. You see the plant without her makeup and realize there’s a deeper beauty here than you’d imagined. The doubles are still beautiful, of course, but now they feel like debutantes at a ball, all polish and poise, and you realize you’ve been keeping company with Amy March, while Jo was there all along, unconcerned with your approval, and now you’ve fallen for her completely.
And the cost of all this? Basically nothing. No fifty-dollar tubers here, just a handful or two of your own seed and time spent doing your favorite thing, playing in the garden.
Over the years my favorite place to be every summer is the seedling field, there’s really no competition. For a dahlia farmer that was starting to burn out and get a little bored, the seedling field lit a fire under me and allowed me to fall in love with dahlias all over again, but in a way that was even closer to the truth of the flower, a deeper connection that helped me see not just dahlias, but other plants and botanical processes in a new light.
That in itself is reason enough to breed and grow out your own dahlias, but there’s so much more to it. Like delicious layers of a cake that hold their own special flavor or texture. You don’t just get to enjoy the seedlings, but you get to select your absolute favorites and keep them, and grow them out and then share them and see their beauty fill the hearts of other gardeners.
In the pages ahead, we’ll get into how to make the crosses, save and clean the seed, raise sturdy seedlings, and sort the field so the keepers shine and the non keepers still earn their place.
Hand Crossing
The first step in hand crossing is always selection. What do you want your new dahlia to look like? And just as important, how do you get that look onto a strong, healthy plant? For me, this is where the fun starts, the imagining, the pairing, the puzzle-solving. Dahlias don’t follow a strict rulebook, but I’ve noticed a pattern over the years: the seed parent often has the bigger say when it comes to plant size and structure.
Let’s say we’re aiming for a tall, vigorous plant with the sweet charm of a collarette, in the same color range as the smaller parent. I’ve made that cross a few times, and the path is fairly clear. For this example, our seed parent will be ‘Café au Lait’ – CAL from here on. CAL makes a great seed parent. It gives big, easy-to-harvest seeds, and it’s generous in passing along height and pale-to-pink blooms that can show up in singles, collarettes, or fully double decoratives. For pollen, we’ll use ‘Cair Paravel,’ a small collarette with bold contrasting color and an easy, open form. This is exactly the pairing that gave me ‘Bell’s Montmartre’ and a handful of other tall collarettes I’m still excited about today.
Getting Set Up
This work starts before any pollen is collected. On a cool morning, I walk the rows with a pocket full of 10-inch organza bags. The light’s still low, there’s a hum under everything, bees working the earlier blooms. When I see a bud just starting to swell, I slip a bag over it. That’s my insurance policy, no bees, no accidental crosses from whatever’s blooming nearby.
For pollen parents and particularly if I’m working with a collarette like ‘Cair Paravel,’ I’ll bag several buds at once. They bloom quicker than a big informal decorative like CAL, so having a few lined up means I can collect more pollen over a couple of days instead of relying on one flower to cooperate.
When the buds open, I take off the petals. It feels a little wrong at first, stripping the bloom just as it’s ready to show off, but there’s good reason for it. Without the petals, there’s less moisture trapped in the bag, more space for air to move, and an unobstructed view when it’s time to collect. The bare disc looks pitiful at first, but in a day or so it starts to glow with fresh pollen.