Every year from mid-August to the beginning of October my hometown hosts a dahlia exhibition in one of its biggest parks. Visitors can vote for their favourite dahlia from a display of 180 varieties, and the winning dahlia is announced at the end of the exhibition.

The dahlias are then cut and sold off to the public in support of a charity, but due to the pandemic they were given to surrounding homes for the elderly in 2020.

I find it amazing that people don’t just sneakily cut dahlias for themselves during the exhibition as the beautiful display is such a temptation.

I fell absolutely in love with a dahlia called Veronique’s DF – number 17 and 19 in the gallery below – and tried to find bulbs, which was very difficult. In the end, bulbs appeared on the website of a vendor I had bought dahlias from before, and I was immensely happy.

What you will not find in the gallery is the winning dahlia named Bodacious. I hadn’t even taken a picture of it so unappealing was it to my taste. And I was seriously disappointed when I read the announcement that it wasn’t my favourite Veronique’s DF that had won…

Click on any pic to start the gallery