Where does Chrysanthemum (garden mum) come from?
Garden chrysanthemums come from China, where people grew them for many centuries, first as a medicinal herb and later for their flowers, before the plant travelled to Japan and became the emblem of its emperors.
From medicine to flower garden
Most chrysanthemum species come from East Asia, and China is the centre of their diversity. Chinese writings describe chrysanthemums from around 500 BCE, when they were valued first as a medicinal plant. From around the 5th century AD they were also grown for beauty. The first book devoted to them, Liu Meng's treatise of 1104, lists 35 cultivated varieties, and by 1630 more than 500 had been recorded. The flower became one of the Four Gentlemen of Chinese art.
Why people say Japan
Chrysanthemums came to Japan from China, and the Japanese were growing them by the Nara and Heian periods, between the 8th and 12th centuries. Emperor Go-Toba liked the flower's design and is thought to have made it the imperial family's crest in the early Kamakura period. A 16-petal double chrysanthemum became the official imperial crest in the Meiji period, and the monarchy itself is called the Chrysanthemum Throne. Edo-period growers bred many new varieties, which later reached China and Europe.
A golden flower for the world
The name chrysanthemum comes from the Greek chrysos, 'gold', and anthemon, 'flower'. The merchant and botanist Jacob Breyne described it in 1689, and in 1792 a French botanist described a variety with big purple flowers brought back from China by Blancard, a navigator from Marseille. Chrysanthemums spread widely in Europe only in the 19th century. A 2026 genome study found that modern cultivars carry genes from wild chrysanthemums of both China and Japan.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Chrysanthemum ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Chrysanthemum × morifolium ↗ · nippon.com ↗ · pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ↗
