If you got to visit our farm for an event last summer, you saw why we love growing the 700-ish named varieties we’ve collected for our fields. Besides the gorgeousness of it all (!), it is so helpful and useful to be able to compare similar blooms side by side for height, and vigor, and to observe how they change throughout the season.
These two beautiful hybrids are similar, but side-by-side they have some obvious differences. Let’s compare them!
Both A la Mode and Peaches-n-Cream are bi-color soft terra cotta and white dahlias. Both give “formal decorative” form blooms, although Peaches-n-Cream (PNC) has longer, more slender petals that recurve a bit more than A la Mode.
PNC can have a swish of palest pink slipped in amongst the pale peachy-terra cotta. A la mode, although truly a bi-color dahlia, can have more intense terracotta at the end of the season.
Bi-color dahlias are technically exhibiting a genetic mutation with their mixed colors, but some are more stable than others. {Example: the dahlia Caribbean Fantasy has extreme and beautiful mutations/color mix variations!}
For us, both these beautiful varieties have about the same moderate amount of variation/color mixing, but because A la Mode has more intense colors, its variations show up more starkly.
Both of these dahlias grow to about the same height (48″ for us), but A la Mode has a heartier habit and produces generally more blooms and tubers. That said, A la Mode needs to be harvested while the centers are quite tight to keep ahead of browning petals on the back, so we often find more useable cut flowers on PNC. Peaches-n-Cream’s breathtakingly dainty appearance is in high demand for wedding and event work, so we often grow 2-3x as much of it as other varieties.
What other differences/similarities do you see in these two? ???? I can’t imagine farming cut flowers without them BOTH!