Looking at the rear view of flowers provides a completely different perspective.
Looking at flowers from behind fascinates me and is a great lesson in the benefits of considering what we think we know from an alternative angle. A different perspective can provide new insights and knowledge that cast a completely different light on something that we’ve accepted as true for a very long time, and it can help us to see beauty and perfection in places we haven’t previously bothered to look.
When I researched the history of the dahlia, collated from a wide range of sources, I was intrigued to find a potted and often contradictory story of a tropical flower native to Mexico and neighbouring South American countries, written almost entirely from a European perspective. Much has been written in recent years in a bid to authenticate the journey of the dahlia from its wild single blooms on the hillsides of Mexico to the double flowered varieties in the botanic gardens and private homes of Europe and England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Noting this confusion, a number of academics in more recent times have undertaken in depth study of significant original written sources that supposedly include early records of the dahlia, such as ‘The Badianus Manuscript’ of 1552 and ‘The Thesaurus’ published in 1651, both written and illustrated texts of medicinal plants used by the Aztecs and other people indigenous to Mexico. However, this resulted in more confusion, generated by doubts that some of the plants referred to in these volumes as ‘acocoxochitl’ were dahlia’s. Like much of history, the narrative of the dahlia seems to have been a jigsaw puzzle with many missing pieces, recreated by different people making educated, and sometimes just hopeful, guesses that may or may not reflect the truth. The various versions of the ‘true history of the dahlia’ have since been perpetually repeated, resulting in a confusing melee of dubious information.
This did, however, peak my curiosity about the dahlia in Aztec culture, as elaborate gardens with a dazzling array of colourful flowers were prized by the wealthy elite, and some flowers were purported to have spiritual significance. Whilst the upper echelons of society may have grown dahlia’s in their vibrant flower gardens, although this has never been confirmed, it is believed that none of the blooms depicted on the iconography of Aztec gods and goddesses are dahlia’s.
With all the ‘smoke and mirrors’ at the back end of the history of these beautiful flowers, what do we actually know about them? Well, we know that single flowered dahlia’s, with one row of petals around the centre filled with yellow disc florets, grow like weeds in the hills and along roadsides in Mexico, and that it is rare to find a double flower, with its multiple rows of petals, among the wild blooms. We also know that one of the earliest written descriptions of the dahlia is the multi-petalled bloom of the double flowering Dahlia pinnata, although how it came to be double in cultivation among the Aztecs remains conjecture. The modern dahlia has over 57,000 registered cultivars, and comes in about 10 different recognised shapes and sizes, from the pompon dahlia I’ve painted that is about five centimetres across, to the varieties with blooms the size of a dinner plate on stems up to 2.5 metre’s tall.
Painting the back of this magenta tinged sunny dahlia revealed a new perspective and peaked my curiosity about the shiny green leaf like structures curling backwards behind the pale yellowish-green sepals. I discovered they were bracts, leaf like structures that in this flower wrap around the young un-open bud as protection in its early development, and as the bloom opens to full maturity, the bracts fold back on themselves, as they are in the process of doing in this painting. I also learnt that bracts can have other functions in other flowers, like the stunning bougainvillea with its three bright pink bracts designed to attract insects to the tiny white true flowers in the centre where reproduction occurs.
Perhaps it’s just my quirky way of looking at life from a different angle and asking questions from an alternate viewpoint, but there’s always something to learn when we look at things from a refreshing new perspective.