National Flower of Mexico

Today has been a lazy one of not doing much.. it has been sunny and warm, but not too hot.

This is my one and only dahlia I would love to have more but we don't have a lot of garden living in a town house. The flowering season of the dahlia is long and they look so beautiful with all their different shapes and colours.

Dahlias originated in Central America and are native from Mexico to Costa Rica. The flowers were known to the Toltecs. An Aztec herbal written in Latin in about 1550 was rediscovered in 1929 and in it, evidence of the dahlia´s use as a treatment for epilepsy.


Plants were taken back to Europe by Spanish adventurers more than 200 years 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.


During the 1800s the popularity of dahlias surged; thousands of varieties emerged and were documented. After a brief flirtation with using dahlia tubers as a food crop to supplement potatoes, it was decided that it was better suited to decoration than food. The rounded pompom was developed in Germany around 1850 and cactus-type emerged from a bit of tuber cultivated in Holland during the 1870s.
For more information on the Dahlia.