Foerster became famous for transforming German garden culture through his vision of hardy perennials: plants that return each year and create landscapes that evolve naturally through the seasons. His gardens reflected a philosophy of continuity, balance, and harmony between human creativity and the rhythms of nature.

Yet among the flowers that fascinated him was one that seemed to contradict his life's work: the dahlia.

Unlike the perennial plants that defined Foerster’s gardens, dahlias are not winter-hardy. Their tubers must be removed from the soil before frost and protected until the following spring. Yet Foerster recognised that a garden is not only a place of permanence. It is also a place of renewal, colour, surprise, and transformation.

He was concerned with what gardeners call the “summer gap”, the period when early summer flowers have faded while autumn blossoms have not yet reached their full expression. The dahlia offered a remarkable solution. With its extraordinary range of colours, forms, and sizes, it allowed the garden to continue flowering.

Foerster’s famous principle, “Es wird durchgeblüht”, “the flowering continues”, found a particularly vivid expression in the dahlia. He valued the flower so highly that he mentioned them in his writing while exploring its history, varieties, and role in garden design.

The dahlia’s place in Foerster’s garden reveals a larger truth: cultures, like gardens, are rarely created in isolation. They grow through encounters, exchanges, and the continuous movement of ideas.

The story of the dahlia is therefore not simply the story of a flower. It is the story of how beauty travels.

A Mexican Flower and the Knowledge of a Civilisation

The journey of the dahlia begins thousands of kilometres away from Potsdam, in Mexico.

Long before it became a favourite of European gardeners, the dahlia belonged to the landscapes and knowledge systems of Mesoamerica. Indigenous communities cultivated and valued the plant, recognising its practical and ornamental qualities.

Known in Nahuatl as acocoxochitl, the dahlia formed part of the rich botanical knowledge developed by Indigenous societies in Mexico.

Like many plants that travelled between continents including cacao, maize, tomatoes, and potatoes the dahlia became part of a wider exchange between worlds. Following European encounters with the Americas, botanical specimens and seeds crossed the Atlantic, introducing European scientists and gardeners to plants that had developed within entirely different ecological and cultural environments.

The movement of plants was also a movement of knowledge. Every seed carried with it a history of human observation, experimentation, and adaptation.

The dahlia’s journey reminds us that cultural exchange has always existed. Long before modern diplomacy created institutions for dialogue between nations, people exchanged ideas through the movement of objects, foods, plants, and artistic traditions.

The Global Journey of Plants

The history of the dahlia belongs to a much larger story: the movement of plants across continents has shaped human civilisation.

The tomato, originally cultivated in the Americas, became central to Italian cuisine and later a defining element of Mediterranean food culture. The potato, originating in the Andes, transformed European agriculture and influenced the economic and social development of entire societies. Cacao travelled from Mesoamerica to become a global symbol of chocolate. Coffee, with origins in Ethiopia, became deeply connected with social life from the Middle East to Europe and beyond.

Flowers followed similar journeys. Tulips travelled from the Ottoman Empire to become closely associated with Dutch horticulture. Chrysanthemums, orchids, and many other flowers moved between Asia, Europe, and the Americas, acquiring new meanings in different cultural settings.

These journeys were never merely botanical. Plants carried traditions, knowledge, tastes, symbols, and memories.

A garden is therefore often a record of human encounters. Its beauty is created through layers of exchange between different places and different generations.

The dahlia is one expression of this much larger history.

Europe’s Reinvention of the Dahlia

When the dahlia arrived in Europe, it gradually changed from a botanical curiosity into a symbol of horticultural creativity.

European gardeners discovered that the plant offered extraordinary possibilities. Through selective cultivation, they developed hundreds of varieties with different forms and colours: decorative dahlias, cactus dahlias, ball dahlias, pompon varieties, and the spectacular large-flowered varieties admired today.

The transformation of the dahlia reflects a deeper cultural question: how do humans interact with nature?

Cultivation is not simply an attempt to control the natural world. It is also a dialogue with it. Human imagination works with nature’s possibilities, creating new forms while remaining connected to the original plant.

This relationship between nature and transformation fascinated many European thinkers.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, although he did not write specifically about dahlias, devoted important scientific work to plants. In The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), Goethe explored the idea that nature contains patterns of transformation and development.

The dahlia, with its remarkable diversity created through cultivation, became a living example of the dialogue between natural potential and human creativity.

When a Flower Became Art: Monet and the Garden as a Cultural Creation

The nineteenth century transformed the garden into a new artistic space. Flowers were no longer simply decorative subjects; they became ways of exploring colour, light, perception, and emotion.

Among the artists who understood this relationship most profoundly was Claude Monet.

One of Monet’s important works featuring dahlias is:

The Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil (A Corner of the Garden with Dahlias)

The painting depicts the garden surrounding Monet’s home in Argenteuil, with dahlias contributing to the richness of the composition. Monet was less interested in botanical precision than in capturing the atmosphere created by colour, light, and movement.

For Monet, the garden itself became a form of artistic expression. His later garden at Giverny continued this philosophy. The arrangement of plants became similar to the composition of a painting: colours, textures, and seasons combined to create a constantly changing work of art.

The dahlia therefore completed another stage of its journey. It moved from cultivated plant to cultural symbol.

Flowers, Painters, and the Language of Beauty

Monet was part of a wider artistic tradition in which flowers became subjects of intellectual and emotional reflection.

Henri Fantin-Latour became one of the nineteenth century’s most admired painters of flowers. His still-life works, including bouquets containing dahlias, elevated flowers beyond decoration and presented them as subjects worthy of contemplation.

For Fantin-Latour, flowers expressed harmony, beauty, and the fragile nature of existence.

Édouard Manet also painted important floral still lifes during the final years of his life. His flower paintings demonstrated that ordinary objects could carry artistic and emotional meaning.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir similarly explored flowers through colour and atmosphere, reflecting the Impressionist fascination with gardens as spaces of human experience.

Together, these artists contributed to a broader cultural transformation: nature became a language through which societies expressed ideas about beauty, memory, and identity.

Flowers in Literature: Memory and Human Experience

The dahlia does not have the same literary tradition as the rose or the lily. However, it belongs to a wider world of literature in which flowers represent memory, beauty, time, and the relationship between humanity and nature.

Marcel Proust explored this relationship throughout In Search of Lost Time. For Proust, flowers were connected to memory and the ability of sensory experiences to preserve moments from the past.

Although dahlias are not a central symbol in his work, Proust’s treatment of gardens illustrates a wider cultural understanding: flowers are not merely objects of beauty. They become connected to human experience.

Similarly, Karel Čapek approached gardening as a philosophical activity in The Gardener’s Year (1931). His writing presented cultivation as a reflection of human patience, humour, and hope.

The dahlia belongs naturally within this tradition. Its beauty requires attention, care, and renewal.

The Dahlia in Popular Culture

Like many cultural symbols, the dahlia has acquired different meanings over time.

The most famous modern association is the phrase “The Black Dahlia”, connected to the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947. The case inspired The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy and the film adaptation The Black Dahlia.

Here, the flower became associated with mystery and memory rather than gardens and beauty.

This contrast demonstrates how symbols evolve. A flower can represent creativity in one cultural context and mystery in another.

The Dahlia as Cultural Diplomacy

The journey of the dahlia ultimately reveals something fundamental about human civilisation.

A flower cannot negotiate treaties, represent governments, or participate in formal diplomacy. Yet it can connect societies through curiosity, admiration, and shared creativity.

A Mexican flower travelled through botanical networks to Europe. It was transformed by gardeners, celebrated by artists, cultivated in Potsdam, and incorporated into the cultural heritage of societies around the world.

Its story reflects the essence of cultural diplomacy: relationships between societies are built not only through political agreements, but also through the exchange of knowledge, creativity, beauty and imagination.

The history of plants offers an important lesson for the future. As humanity enters an age shaped by artificial intelligence and new technologies, the challenge will not only be to create new tools, but to ensure that these tools develop within a framework of cultural understanding and human values.

Just as botanical exchange enriched civilisation in previous centuries, the exchange of ideas between cultures will shape the future.

The dahlia reminds us that culture travels quietly. A seed, a painting, a book, or an idea can cross continents and generations, creating connections long before official diplomacy begins.

The dahlia is more than a flower. It is a symbol of movement, transformation, and the enduring human capacity to turn encounters between cultures into something beautiful.

• Independent