Still Life with Dahlias

I have always loved low key still lives but have only recently bought some dark background cloth. I thought if you applied a dark texture in post processing you got dark results no matter what the colour of the background. But it can be very difficult working that way, and often it is impossible to get the richness and crisp contrast of tones a dark background allows you to achieve.
I shot this image last October wanting to create an interesting and different autumn still life. The colourful and luscious dahlias must be the most beautiful  blooms at that time of year, and I had found some unusual looking autumn plants to team them up with. I hardly did anything to this image in photoshop, it just did not need much. You know you have a good shot when you can show it virtually straight out of camera. All I did is slightly deepened the colour of the background to make the set up stand out better, and I slightly decreased the highlights to get better detail in them.