Professor of Ornamental Horticulture, College of Horticulture, Shanxi Agricultural University
The dahlia is native to the mountains of Hiscico at an altitude of 1500 to 3700 meters, and is the national flower of Mexico. However, before becoming the national flower, she remained unknown.
It was originally cultivated to eat its underground roots, which resemble sweet potatoes.
In 1570, a doctor from Spain was ordered to study Mexican products in the ancient Mexican Empire, and he once wrote that dahlia was eaten as a snack by the Aztecs or used to treat epilepsy, in which the tall stem hollow was used as a water pipe.
However, when potatoes began to become popular in the world, dahlias were discarded from the table.
In 1789, the explorer Vicente Cervantes sent dahlias from Mexico City to the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid, where they blossomed in Europe and received the genus name Dahlia, in honor of Linnaeus' student, Anders Dahl, a Swedish botanist who first introduced Linnaeus's classification system to Spain.
See the dahlia blossoming at the Royal Botanical Gardens of Madrid, Cavanilles, and happily send the roots of each new species to the major botanical gardens in Europe. Napoleon's wife Josephine loved the flower and collected another dahlia brought back from the Americas by the geographer Humboldt. Through the hybridization and cultivation of Bonpland, the head of his private garden, the loser who originally entered the gastronomic world conquered the world by his appearance.
You would never have imagined that the Dahlia, which had only a single layer of petals earlier, turned around several times and became what it became...