Where does Dahlia come from?
The dahlia comes from the highlands of central Mexico, home to almost all wild dahlia species. The Aztecs knew it long before Spanish botanists sent it to Europe in 1789, and in 1963 Mexico declared the dahlia its national flower.
Water canes of the Aztecs
Dahlias grow wild in Mexico's uplands and mountains, between 1,500 and 3,700 metres, in pine–oak woodland. Indigenous peoples gathered and grew them for food, medicine and decoration. The Aztecs called them acocotli and cocoxochitl, names that refer to the plants' hollow stems, and used the long hollow stems of the tree dahlia as water pipes. Spaniards reported the plants in 1525, and Francisco Hernández, sent to Mexico by Philip II in 1570, wrote the earliest known description.
Named in Madrid
In 1789 Vicente Cervantes, director of the botanical garden in Mexico City, sent plant parts to Antonio José Cavanilles at the Royal Gardens of Madrid. Cavanilles flowered one plant that year and a second the next, and in 1791 he named the genus Dahlia after the Swedish botanist Anders Dahl, who had studied under Linnaeus and died in 1789. From Madrid, seeds and tubers went to Italy, Germany, France and England, and breeders soon raised double flowers.
Why people say the Netherlands
Dutch growers did shape the modern dahlia. In 1872 one of them, J. T. van der Berg, saved one living piece of root from a rotten shipment sent from Mexico. It grew into a red flower with petals rolled backwards, which he named Dahlia juarezii after Mexico's late president Benito Juárez. Crossed with older dahlias, this 'cactus dahlia' led to the modern hybrids. Today the town of Zundert, in the Netherlands, decorates its parade floats with some 8 million dahlias.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · web.stanford.edu ↗
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