About This Stamp
The U.S. Postal Service celebrates the blooming of summer flowers with a bounty of picturesque Dahlias Forever® stamps. Dahlias belong to the prodigious Asteraceae family, which also includes sunflowers, zinnias, asters, rudbeckias, and daisies. Their exuberant blooms have long delighted gardeners and ornamental plant lovers for their remarkable diversity and rich displays of color.
These colorful, floral stamps feature close-up images of dahlias and their pistils. The pink, white, yellow, magenta, and red blossoms were photographed in private gardens by photographer Denise Ippolito using natural light.
Dahlias are native to Mexico and Central America, where they grow as wildflowers and were cultivated in Aztec gardens. Around 1789, the director of the Botanical Garden of Mexico City sent dahlia seeds to the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid. From there they spread to other European cities where they became popular due to the ease of hybridization and cultivation. Many new types emerged during this time. These gorgeous new varieties prompted a dizzying frenzy of dahlia growing, which reached its apex during the Victorian period.
By the mid-19th century, dahlias had arrived in the United States where they also flourished. Over the years, as backyard gardeners looked to less flamboyant plants that were easier to maintain, dahlias lost favor. Today, they have experienced a resurgence in popularity in the U.S. and worldwide.
The impressive variety in dahlia style and color stems from their octoploid cells, which have eight sets of chromosomes rather than the usual two. Crossbreeding and mutations are common and prolific, resulting in an abundance of new dahlia cultivars each year. Dahlias come in almost every shade except blue and black. So-called “black dahlias” are actually a dark burgundy color.
Shapes range from delicate star-shaped blooms to dense, intricate balls of petals atop sturdy, hollow stems. Their long growing season adds to their demand; dahlias bloom continuously well up to the first frost, delighting admirers the world over.
Art director Greg Breeding designed the stamps using existing photographs.
The Dahlias stamps are being issued as Forever® stamps in booklets of 20. These Forever stamps will always be equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
Greg Breeding
Greg Breeding is a graphic designer and principal of Journey Group, a design company he co-founded in 1992, located in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was creative director until 2013, at which time he began serving as president and continued in that role through 2023.
Breeding’s fascination with modernism began while studying design at Virginia Commonwealth University. His affinity with the movement continues and motivates his ongoing advanced studies at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland most every summer.
As an art director for postage stamp design since 2012, Breeding has designed more than 100 stamps covering a diverse array of subjects, from Star Wars droids and Batman to Harlem Renaissance writers and the transcontinental railroad.
His work has been recognized in annual design competitions held by Graphis, AIGA, PRINT magazine, and Communication Arts.
Breeding lives in North Garden, Virginia, with his wife and enjoys nothing so much as frolicking on the floor with his grandchildren.
Existing Photos
Denise Ippolito
New Jersey-based Denise Ippolito is a full-time professional photographer, workshop leader, and artist. She travels extensively presenting slide lectures and seminars and teaching photography and Photoshop. Her workshops feature a variety of subjects, including avian, flower, landscape, and creative photography.
Ippolito has won several awards for her work. In 2010, and again in 2014, she received a Highly Honored award in the prestigious Windland Smith Rice Nature's Best International Awards Competition. Also in 2014, one of her images was selected as part of the People's Choice Awards Top 50 Images in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition. In 2015 she won the Art in Nature category in the Nature's Best Competition, and the following year her image of a Moseley's rockhopper penguin was selected as the Birds category winner in the same competition. Her image “Snow Globe” was selected as the First Place Winged Life category winner for the 2017 BigPicture: Natural World Photography Competition.
Ippolito’s work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Nature’s Best Photography magazine, GEO magazine, and the 2018 book Wonders: Spectacular Moments in Nature Photography from the California Academy of Sciences, among other publications. Her images have hung in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and the San Diego Natural History Museum, and are featured in a 2011 Sierra Club documentary on the preservation of the Florida Everglades. More recently, Ippolito herself appeared in an episode of Xploration Awesome Planet for Fox Television.
Ippolito's photographs appeared on the Tulip Blossoms stamp issuance in 2023 and the Dahlias stamp issuance in 2025.