ADS form FD
Formal Decorative dahlias
Fully double blooms with flat, broad ray florets in a regular, even arrangement that recurves gradually toward the stem. The tidy classic of the decorative group.
Formal Decorative varieties carry an ADS size letter: AA (over 10 inches) down to M (up to 4 inches). The catalog word "dinnerplate" maps loosely to AA and A; it is marketing language, not a class.
Profiled formal decorative varieties
Castle Drive
A light blend in soft sherbet peach. Coseytown and Idlewild note it carries less yellow than the varieties it gets confused with.
Rock Run Ashley
Soft guava pink with a muted peach cast that reads almost nude in bright light. Idlewild Blooms notes the color shifts between guava pink and muted peach over the season.
Bloomquist Tory P
Blush lavender over a pale base, ADS color chip PK18. Vendors describe a silvery, muted pink with a marshmallow base and an amethyst blush, like petals cut from porcelain.
Sweet Nathalie
A light blend in champagne and bisque, a soft neutral that shows more blush early in the season.
Peaches-N-Cream
A light blend of peach and cream, with streaks and brushmarks of each color varying bloom to bloom. No two flowers stripe quite the same way, which is most of the charm.
American Dawn
A coral, raspberry, and plum ombre that refuses to sit still. Good Life Dahlias notes the colors change through the season, from bright pink with purple hues to bronze with the same purple undertones.
Chimacum Night
Chocolatey burgundy mahogany, classed dark red by DahliaAddict. Floret simply calls the blooms beautiful mahogany, and in the field they read like dark chocolate with a red wine glaze.
Blizzard
Pure white, ADS color class W, with the clean petal geometry of a formal decorative. No cream cast, no blush, which is precisely what designers buying white want to hear.
Diva
ADS color class purple. Vendors describe deep burgundy-plum petals with an iridescent purple sheen that shifts in the light, darker and moodier than the typical purple decorative.
Wine Eyed Jill
A light blend of petite pink petals around a wine to burgundy center, with an occasional yellow splash.
KA's Boho Peach
Peachy pink that opens warm coral, with the back petals fading as the bloom ages. The two-tone shift from coral to softer peach gives arrangements depth.
KA's Bella Luna
White with a lavender blush in cool climates, shifting to all white in warm climates and late season. The color is weather-dependent, which is the variety's signature trick.
Thomas Edison
Velvety deep purple. Old House Gardens calls it the truest deep purple of all dahlias, a color photos cannot quite capture and one modern breeders still envy.
Ferncliff Copper
Warm peachy copper, a fall tone that arrangers reach for from late summer on.
Kelvin Floodlight
Bright clear yellow on a giant formal decorative, ADS class AA FD, big enough to read across a garden.
Bracken Palomino
A shifting peachy-orange to peachy-coral, the color moving through the season and even across a single bloom.
Bracken Sarah
A soft peach-apricot blend, the gentler sister to Bracken Palomino in the same warm family.
Lark's Ebbe
A bronze-peach that shifts through the season, ADS class 3011, never quite the same color twice.
Fluffles
Shell to bubblegum pink outer petals around a creamy eggnog center.
Bracken Rose
Dusty rose, often called ballet slipper pink, with slight purple undertones.
Irish Gnome
A clear yellow on a tiny micro formal decorative, perfect and precise at under two inches.
KA's Tiny E
Glowing fuchsia, the bright, saturated tone that defines Albrecht's Bright Series. The color is the point, vivid and clear where many small dahlias go muddy.
KA's Mocha Jo
Blush pink with tawny parchment accents, the most layered color in the Mocha line. The parchment edges give each bloom a soft, antique cast.
KA's Rose Quartz
Medium pink with a darker center and a white highlight on the central petals. The light center against the deeper pink gives blooms a lit-from-within look.
Coseytown Rosewood
Muted muddy red with a contrasting lavender reverse on the newest petals. The two-tone effect, deep red face against a cooler lavender back, gives blooms unusual depth.
Coseytown EverPeach
A solid midtone orange-peach bred to hold a consistent color all season as daylight shortens, a trait the breeder calls rare. Most peach dahlias drift with the season; this one is selected not to.
Chimacum Katie
Saturated hot pink, closer to bubblegum than to rose, and it holds that intensity rather than fading through the season. The ADS files it under the lavender color class, chip LV10, which catches people out. Every grower who describes the flower, including Idlewild in the same breath as its own lavender classification, calls it bold, bright, and pink. Read the class as registry bookkeeping, not as a description of what lands in the vase.
Miss Amara
A light blend that travels through the season rather than holding one note. Heirloom Soul tracks it from soft yellows and buttercreams tinged with pink early to sweet peach later; Sunset View reads peach and blush, Floret peachy yellow. The ADS color class is Light Blend, which for once matches what growers actually see.
Strawberry Cream
Cream and strawberry pink laid on in stripes and brushmarks that shift bloom to bloom, sometimes on the same stem. Sunset View warns that like many bicolors it will occasionally throw flowers carrying varying mixes of its two colors on one plant, so a bunch cut on a single morning will not necessarily match itself. Whether that is the charm or the problem depends on whether you are arranging or filling an order.
Black Satin
Deep black red with maroon under it, and one of the darkest things most growers will have in the field. Swan Island calls it a deep black red in a much sought after color; Heirloom Soul calls it the darkest black dahlia in their field. Sellers file it variously as red, dark red and maroon, which is the usual disagreement about where a very dark red stops being red.
Brookside Snowball
Pure white without a cream or green cast, which is harder to breed than it sounds and is most of why this one has lasted. Heirloom Soul notes the centers open to reveal rich yellow pollen, so the flower reads white with a warm eye rather than flat white.
Cryfield Harmony
Deep magenta leaning purple, saturated rather than soft. The ADS files it under the purple color class, chip PR26, and Heirloom Soul calls it deep magenta, which is the same flower described from the pink side of the boundary.
Natalie G
A light blend of peach and pink that different growers see from different angles. Floret describes melon pink rounded blooms with a light lavender dusting, Sunset View a blush pink, Summer Dreams soft peach, and Heirloom Soul deep apricot pink. The ADS color class recorded by Micro Flower Farm is Light Blend, which is the registry's way of saying the same thing.
Ryecroft Jan
Clean white with no yellow in it. Summer Dreams reads it as ivory white and Three Sprouts specifies crisp ivory with no yellow undertones, which is the distinction that matters in a white dahlia, since many of them run cream or green at the center.
Sweet Love
Cotton candy pink fading toward white away from the petal tips, over a creamy golden center. Rich Hollow sees lavender in it as well as pink, Sunset View reads it as pink tinged with white, Pig & Leaf as pale pink with creamy centers, and Heirloom Soul as soft pinky lavender. The pink is soft rather than saturated in every account.
Tangerine Dream
Orange petals tipped and striped with white, over a rose pink reverse that shows as the petals curl. Valhaven records the reverse explicitly. The balance shifts through the season: Pure Indulgence reports it moving from orange and white to golden and white, and Heirloom Soul describes it the other way round, as white with a dark orange stripe. Other sellers call the orange rusty, which is the same flower later in its run.
White Perfection
Pure white with a light yellow center, recorded by Ball Seed. At dinnerplate scale a clean white is difficult to breed, since most large whites go cream or show green at the crown, and the absence of any source mentioning a cast is itself informative.