This is always a bittersweet day—the last day of summer—as we turn toward the darker months, especially here on the 48th parallel.

Autumn is my favorite season and I’ll celebrate that tomorrow, but today the sun is still warm and glorious and dahlias are at their peak. I took these photos in a nearby garden, and in particular, I love the ones that seem like miniature suns—you almost expect them to emit heat. So it wasn’t a surprise to learn some of their history.

Dahlias were once an important root crop and medicinal plant among the pre-Columbian Indians of central Mexico, Yucatan and Guatemala. Its roots were valued both for the nutritious inulin stored inside them and for the antibiotic compounds concentrated in the skin of the tubers. The dahlia flower was a solar symbol worn by Moctezuma and his nobles. The Aztecs gathered and cultivated dahlias for food, ceremony, as well as decorative purposes, and the long woody stem of one variety was used for small pipes.

That was news to me, but despite what Gertrude Stein said on the subject, I’ve learned never to assume that a flower is just a flower. Our plant allies have so much more to share with us and teach us. The infinite variety just among dahlias is mind boggling. The dahlia below looks like it captured a tiny sunflower and merged with it. If you can bear to pick them, dahlias do make excellent cut flowers.

A cloudy day dawns:
a vase full of dahlias
floods my room with sun.

Sniff some other flowers here.