Baccara Dahlia Tuber
A deep, dark, velvety red/black 4-6 inch ball dahlia.
Hooo wheee!
Baccara is an incredibly vital and vigorous plant. One of the very first to sprout every year with her dark purple/green foliage, dark stems, and black buds. Whoa. I'm not sure you can get any more dramatic.
She's super prolific, and tolerant of all kinds of situations, heat, dry, wet, cool--which is very handy in these uncertain times. Her dark foliage does seem to collect more solar radiation on bright warm days, and that can cause her to wilt a bit more than other varieties as she moderates her temperature, but her production seemed undaunted.
Her flowers seem to be less visible to all the creatures who relish a dahlia-petal-breakfast--perhaps the color is a kind of camouflage and they just don't see her, or maybe she's not as tasty as every blush or white variety I grow? Ha! These flowers also last a really long time in the vase.
Her stems can be a little thick, even after pinching, and they're very strong, almost hard, so just keep cutting deeply to get her to reach more slender stems up for the light.
I had one plant suddenly go single (sported), and send up these incredibly tall, wildly long stems full of bee-feeding, bright yellow, pollen-rich centers. They weren't exactly what I was going for, but gosh, they were so pretty and the bees loved them so much, I'm going to keep her and propagate them out! (The last photo.)