Garden Plants - Dahlia

The story of any flower in remote antiquity can sometimes be reconstructed by primitive bits of magic and myth. The Dahlia did not originate in Europe, but in Mexico and was well known by the Aztecs. An Aztec herbal - written in Latin - and composed just sixty years after the coming of Columbus was rediscovered in 1929. It clearly showed that the Aztecs used dahlias as a treatment for epilepsy.

The dahlia was late in coming to Europe, being carried home by Spanish adventurers more than two centuries ago. At the Botanical Gardens in Madrid, the Abbe Cavanille named the genus 'Dahlia' for Andreas Dahl, a noted Swedish botanist and student of Carl Linnaeus.

These scientific specialists took over the plant and subjected it to severe scrutiny; this was because they were frantically seeking a new root crop to serve as a cheap and easily cultivated food source, following the outbreak of disease in the early 1840s that destroyed the French potato crop. However, after tasting the dahlia they gave up on that idea and decided just to grow it for its beauty. The rounded pompom bloom was developed in Germany around 1850 and the odder cactus type emerged from a section of tuber that had been cultivated in Holland during the 1870s.

Modern specialists turned to the dahlia for medical reasons and this time it was not in vain. In the days before insulin was discovered diabetics were often given a substance called Atlantic starch or diabetic sugar made from dahlia tubers. The medicine they yield is no longer fed to diabetics, but it is useful in making clinical tests for the functioning of the liver while inulin, another chemical derived from dahlia tubers, is used in the same way to test the kidneys.

Garden dahlia photograph by KaCey97007, used under a creative commons attribution licence