The dahlia’s comeback as a cut flower
I am not a big fan of flowers that are too showy — unless they are peonies. Peonies can never be anything but breathtaking; but I digress.
I used to think dahlias are just too theatrical, too high maintenance. Now I find single dahlias completely irresistible. Dahlias sort of ambushed me with an article on its history and a few photographs of wild dahlias growing at altitude in Mexico.
It was all downhill from there. Now I buy dahlias as cut flowers, plant tubers and even pay to pick a bucket of fresh dahlias.
The dahlia has a fascinating horticultural history. For starters, I never knew it was Mexico’s national flower. ‘Discovery’ is an odd word to use for a plant that is endemic to one country but unfamiliar to another, but such was Europe’s Age of Enlightenment. The dahlia’s ‘discovery’ goes all the way back to the 16th century.
Francisco Hernández was the first European to describe the dahlia during an expedition to the New World in the 1570s. At the time, it was not called a dahlia but referred to as acocotl or acocoxochitl or cocoxoehitl. Then came the Age of Enlightenment and with it the European passion to explore, discover, collect and categorise exotic flora and fauna.
The dahlia’s horticultural debut in Europe came a little later and is linked to seed collected by a Spanish botanical expedition to Mexico in 1786. In 1789 — the year of the French Revolution — Antonio Cavanilles fled from France and returned to Spain to work at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Madrid. Here he began the arduous task of writing up the material collected during the 1786 expedition.
Cavanilles corresponded with botanists throughout Europe, including Carl Peter Thunberg. The same Thunberg who travelled far and wide to collect and describe plants, visiting the Cape of Good Hope, Batavia and Japan. Both men were keen to honour Anders Dahl, a Swedish botanist, who died in 1789 at the age of 38. Thunberg wanted to name a witch hazel in memory of Dahl (Dahlia crinita), but he was too late, because Cavanilles had already published his taxonomy of the genus Dahlia. Cavanilles also described three species: D. pinnata, D. rosea and D. coccinea.
The dahlia, with its roots in the Aztec empire, was a showstopper in Europe. Amateur collectors and nurserymen were soon competing to produce new varieties, new colours and especially double flowers. Plant collectors headed to the New World to collect more species and distributed seed to botanical gardens and collectors throughout Europe. The dahlia did not disappoint and by 1804 breeders had produced more than 4,000 varieties.
I simply adore varieties with small single flowers and buy a couple every year, although I am no good at preserving the tubers.
Wrong country, but to this day I cannot read an article on dahlia cultivation or see a potted dahlia in a nursery without hearing Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack to The Mission (1986), or more specifically, the track ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’.
Further reading: Dahlia Myths and Aztec Mythology. The Dahlia in History by Martin Král.