The evolution of the dahlia

The Mexian species Dahlia coccinea illustrated in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine of 1804.

I delved into the history of the dahlia for my book Painterly Plants (now out of print), and found a fascinating and rich story that leads to the amazing variety of flowers available to us now. The dahlia is native to the mountainous regions of Mexico and central America, and it arrived in the West via Spain from at the end of the eighteenth century (although it had been widely cultivated in Mexico for hundreds of years before this). The first known illustration of the dahlia appeared in an Aztec herbal in 1552 – a simple coloured painting of Dahlia coccinea with its single orange-red flowers – and it was around this time that the dahlia was discovered by the first European, Francisco Hernandez, physician to the King of Spain, who also illustrated several double-flowered dahlias in his own posthumously published herbal. Despite this initial flurry of interest, somehow the dahlia missed the boat (unlike other South American plants discovered by the Spanish at the same time such as the passion flower and the tomato), and it wasn’t until a good 300 years later until the plant was successfully grown in Europe.