'My beautiful dahlias have given me a dazzling new career

 Flower grower and founder of Dahlia Beach, Andie McDowell

- SHARON PARSONS

When Andie McDowell set herself a challenge in 2020-to transform her unassuming Oxfordshire garden into a riot of colour and open it under the National Garden Scheme three months later - she wasn't to know that it would be the beginning of an extraordinary new venture.

'Before the pandemic struck, I had a really successful wedding video business with a team of six and hundreds of bookings in place,' she explains. 'Overnight, everything collapsed as weddings were cancelled and we had to go into liquidation. It was a nightmare.'

To give her something to focus on, she and her family husband Johnny and their children Mollie, Oscar and Alice (now 13, eight and five) - created a massive flower bed and planted hundreds of dahlia tubers. Although I've always been interested in gardening, I'm certainly no expert, but I knew these plants would grow fast and look amazing, Andie recalls. She was right.

Visitors, along with her growing band of Instagram followers, were entranced by the beautiful colour-coordinated varieties -an ombre effect' - which flowed like an amazing sea of petals. Everyone suddenly wanted to dip into dahlias.

'I am a bit of an entrepreneur and I could see that there was a niche opportunity for a business focussed on this incredible plant,' says Andie, who worked in TV production in London before moving with her young family to Oxfordshire eight years ago. And so her company, Dahlia Beach, was born.