In a Vase on Monday: Coffee n’ Cake

Regular visitors to Rambling in the Garden will have guessed from the title what is being featured in today’s vase, without even seeing the photo: Dahlia ‘Café au Lait’.

This distinctive decorative dahlia has large heads in a milky coffee colour with a hint of pink at the tips of the petals, sometimes producing a noticeably pink tint to the coffee. It was the dahlia’s size that nearly deterred me from purchasing the tuber, as the blooms are sometimes HUGE rather than large, and the plants VERY tall rather than a little tallish; in its first year here, mine is still acceptable in size and stature, and a single bloom sits comfortably in a Denby ‘coffee’ cup with a further bud popped into a Caithness Glass bud vase in the same Moss colour as Mum’s vase that held Brian’s dahlias a couple of weeks ago. The accompanying cake is a piece of freshly baked lemon drizzle.

Until the vase was put together, the  bud vase was home to some ‘Vanilla Ice’ sunflower  snippings, leftover from a posy given to a friend a couple of days ago; rather than chuck them out, I stretched up the 6 or 7 feet required to cut some more to join them in a bright green vase bought very cheaply some years ago when I was buying green ephemera to add to new shelves in the kitchen. I like all stages of sunflowers, from bud to bloom to spent head, and this extra vase includes all three. I am not sure if I have used this particular vase on a Monday before – it is made from very thin glass and could easily become top-heavy with an ill-advised choice of blooms but these fairly delicate sunflowers work well in it today.

With the quantity of dahlias blooming in the garden, using just one-and-a-bud in today’s modest main vase could be seen as uninspiring, but it is such a statement dahlia, receiving nearly as many complements as my lemon drizzle cake (self praise may be no praise, but it’s still the truth!), thus earning this Coffee n’ Cake combo its place on IAVOM. Will you be joining us today, with your own pickings? It would be lovely to see your own vase or jam jar, so do share it with us if you can by leaving links to and from this post in the usual way.