G ardeners are a deviant lot. Despite our passion for wildlife gardening and the drive to be sustained by, and share, our own fruit and veg, our appetite for novelty, aberrancy and even the spectacularly monstrous is insatiable.

Take a look at this. The flower is the size of a plate and the brightest orange, like Mark Rothko’s painting No. 210/No. 211 (Orange) , with a kind of vibrating stillness, maybe the colour of a sugar maple in autumn sunlight. The ray florets are a mass of long, pointed, half‑curled petals, wildly dancing, writhing away from the central boss of golden disc florets.

This exotic vision is a dahlia . We bought a bag of dahlia tubers from the supermarket and planted them in the allotment back in May. We lost the label and, anyway, they grew into three different varieties together, so we’d be none the wiser.…