Dahlias: A Little Book of Flowers

by Tara Austen Weaver, Emily Poole (Illustrator)

Overview

This delightful celebration of the dahlia reads like a “very smart love letter to cultivating beauty” and features 60+ vintage-inspired full-color botanical illustrations (Seattle Times).

“Next time you are lucky enough to be someone’s houseguest, consider arriving with a bouquet of either one of the Little Book of Flowers.”—The New York Times

Dahlias are the showboats of the flower world—colorful, flamboyant, and spectacular. They're also one of the most satisfying flowers to grow, with a long season, plentiful blooms, and are adaptable to most climates with proper care. They're very easy to propagate, and can be hybridized. There are numerous dahlia flower forms and more than 50,000 recognized cultivars!

This charming little hardcover book includes:

• 60+ full-color botanical illustrations
• basic botany and history
• everything you need to know to grow gorgeous blooms in the garden (including dividing tubers to propagate more flowers)
• tips for creating beautiful arrangements and preserving flowers
• quotes, lore, and notable gardens and growers

Like a bouquet of dahlias, this book is an affordable little luxury for gardeners and flower lovers—the perfect hostess gift or Mother's Day present. It’s part of the collectible mini gift book series Little Book of Natural Wonders.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632176462
Publisher:	Blue Star Press
Publication date:	07/22/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	52
File size:	81 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

TARA AUSTEN WEAVER is a freelance writer, editor, and author of The Butcher & The Vegetarian and Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow. Tara's food blog, Tea & Cookies, established in 2006, was selected as one of the top 50 food sites in the world by both the Times of London and The Independent and has been featured on The Food Network, Saveur, Oprah.com, Apartment Therapy, The Kitchn, Reddit, and Bonappetit.com. She is a trained Master Gardener, Permaculture Designer, and Master Composter/Soil Builder.

Emily Poole is a freelance illustrator, born and raised in the mountain town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Illustration and is currently located in Eugene, Oregon. She has created work for the Teton Raptor Center, World Wildlife Fund Guyana, and the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

Read an Excerpt

Origin of the Species

“There’s probably no plant in the flower kingdom that gives the gardener more spectacular reward than the dahlia.”
—RAY ALLEN
 
Dahlias are the showgirls of the flower world—extravagantly beautiful, they sashay into the summer garden and demand all our attention. But like any stage performer, their beauty is deceptive. Dahlias are hard workers and strong, putting out bloom after bloom from midsummer right into autumn. The show finally ends with the first hard frost, which brings down the curtain on their dazzling performance. Few flowers produce for so long, with such diversity of color, size, shape, and cutting potential. If ever there was a bloom that earned its keep, it’s the dahlia.
 
The modern dahlia traces its roots to Mexico and Central America, where they were cultivated and gathered wild by the Aztecs and other indigenous people, prized more for their edible roots and hollow stems that were used to carry water than for the flowers themselves. The name for dahlias in the Nahuatl language spoken by the Aztecs is acocoxochitl, which translates as “water tube flower.” Dahlias root tubers were also used for their curative properties—to treat ailments such as epilepsy, fevers, urinary tract disorders, and colic. The petals were known to soothe rashes, insect bites, and dry skin.
 
When European explorers arrived from Spain in the late 1500s, they were intrigued by the flowers they saw growing wild on sunny hillsides. The blooms were fairly simple, with a single row of petals, but all attention was focused on the tubers—plump underground roots that resembled a sweet potato in shape. The first drawings of what we know as dahlias were published in Europe in 1651.
 
By the late eighteenth century dahlias themselves had arrived in Europe—sent by the director of the Botanical Garden in Mexico City to the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid, where they were named for the famous Swedish botanist Anders Dahl. Initial interest in the edibility of the tubers quickly faded (they are fibrous and can cause digestive upset), but this era was marked by great botanical exploration, where European botanical gardens, noted horticulturists, and the aristocracy were vying to acquire the rare plants that were being brought from all corners of the globe.

By the early 1800s, dahlias had made their way to France and England, eagerly sought after and in high demand. The flowers were still quite simple, but that soon was to change. The 1800s saw a frenzy of dahlia introductions across Europe—the anemone dahlia was developed in Ireland, while the charming collarette emerged in France, and the formal decorative in Germany. The spiky cactus form was introduced by the Dutch, the lone surviving dahlia tuber from a crate that had been shipped from Mexico but rotted during the journey. Dahlias became a hobby of the wealthy (or, rather, the work of their gardeners). Tubers could be purchased but they were not cheap and flower shows offered
generous prizes for exciting new blooms. As growers throughout Europe began breeding dahlias, more decorative blooms were developed. By 1836, the Horticultural Society of London (now the Royal Horticultural Society) published a dahlia register that listed seven hundred different varieties of the flower. The year prior had seen forty-five different dahlia shows held in Britain alone. Dahlia fever was taking hold.
 
The Great Exhibition, held in London in 1851, put the dahlia on the map in a new way, introducing it to a wider cross-section of society and increasing demand. The upper classes had been installing “dahlia walks” in their gardens—grassy paths lined with wide beds of dahlias so they could admire the blooms—but now the average backyard gardener wanted dahlias as well. Dahlias were said to symbolize dignity to the Victorians, with their upright stalks, though the meaning broadened over time to include elegance, respect, compassion, and a lifelong bond.
 
Part of the success of the dahlia is due to how easy they are to hybridize. Most dahlias are grown from tubers, resulting in an exact clone of the original flower. By collecting and planting the seed of any dahlia, however, you will grow a combination of the original dahlia and whatever dahlia whose pollen was brought by bees or other pollinators. As a result, there are fifty-seven thousand named cultivars of dahlias, with more being introduced each year (for comparison,
there are only three thousand named rose cultivars).
 
This excitement for dahlias continues today—in new varieties that are released to the public, in the delight of seeing the first bloom of a new cultivar in the garden, in the generosity of a plant that starts off in midsummer and blooms straight until frost takes it down, in the fact that cutting flowers is a sure way to encourage more blooms. It’s no wonder that people so easily become obsessed with the dahlia.

Editorial Reviews

"Next time you are lucky enough to be someone’s houseguest, consider arriving with a bouquet of either one of the Little Book of Flowers. . . Each book includes snappy discussions of the origins of the species, cultivation techniques and suggestions for display. The charm lies in Poole’s art. . . there’s a distinctly retro appeal to the watercolors here, which slow you down to linger over crinkled petals and bombshell flower heads. These books don’t pretend to be encyclopedic; rather, Weaver is discerning in her choices."
—New York Times

"In 'A Little Book of Flowers,' a new series of single bloom titles, author Tara Austen Weaver weaves together basic botany and culture. Each posey-size volume reads like a very smart love letter to cultivating beauty. . . Charming illustrations by Emily Poole and numerous quotes tug at our horticultural heartstrings, while a serviceable glossary and resource section at the back of each book indulge our yearning to grow more flowers and deepen our knowledge of the natural world."
—Seattle Times, Pacific NW Magazine

"If the words "hidden gem" make you sit up and pay attention, this just may be the perfect book for the nature lover on your list!...It’s a must for flower fans. If you wanted to give a lavish gift, pair this with a fresh flower subscription."
—Modern Mrs. Darcy

From the Publisher