THE   DAHLIA, once grown locally in gardens in yards  in Georgetown, belongs to a class of bushy, tuberous, perennial plants native to Mexico, Central America,  Colombia, and the tropics . The Spanish humanist physician, Francisco Hernandez  visited Mexico in 1615 and noticed two spectacular varieties of dahlias, which he mentioned in his account of medicinal plants of New Spain, not published until 1651.
Hernandez reported that the Aztecs gathered and cultivated the dahlia for food, ceremonies, as well as decorative purposes, and the long woody stem of one variety was used for small pipes.
The French botanist, Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville, on a visit to Mexico in 1787 remarked on the  strangely beautiful flowers he had seen there in his official report, published the same year.
The first tubers were sent over to Europe to Spain by the Spanish settlers in Mexico, and arrived at the end of the 18th Century.
Seeds sent from the botanical garden of Mexico City to Madrid flowered for the first time in the botanical garden in October 1789, and were named Dahlia coccinea by Antonio José Cavanilles, the head of the Madrid Botanical Garden, in his Icones plantarum, 1791.
The Swedish 18th Century botanist, Andreas Dahl (after whom the plant is named) regarded it as a vegetable rather than a garden flower, but interest switched from the edible tubers to the blooms when the first varieties with large, double flowers were bred in Belgium in 1815.
A few seeds were secured by Lord Bute and sent to England, where they flowered but were lost.
Since 1813, commercial plant breeders throughout the world have been breeding dahlias to produce thousands of cultivars, usually chosen for their stunning and brightly-coloured waxy flowers.
There are at least 36 species, and the plants range in height from as low as 12 inches to as tall as 6 to 8 ft.
The flowers can be as small as 2 inches in diameter, or up to 1 foot.
The Dahlia was named the national flower of Mexico in 1963.
In Guyana, the dahlia was once a normal sight in many yards in Georgetown.
It is now considered locally to be extinct, much to the regret of some  members of the Horticultural Society of Guyana (HSG).
Last week, HSG Secretary, Mrs. Coreen Alleyne, said:  “In the 1950s and the 1960s, we used to have dahlias; we don’t see dahlias now. The HSG needs to do something more to bring back into gardens a lot of the tropical plants which we had in those days.”