THE DAHLIA : ITS REPUTED INTRODUCTION IN 1789. 307 
by the late Lady Bute, who procured it from Madrid in the same year 
that it arrived from America, but either through a want of care or 
judgment in the cultivation these plants were entirely lost to our 
gardens until seeds were reintroduced by Lady Holland in 1804." 
In the "Annual Dahlia Register," 1836, the history of the flower is 
given in the form of an extract from " Floriculture," by J. Mantell, 
the second edition of which appeared in 1834. It begins : " The Dahlia 
is a native of Mexico and was first introduced into this country in the 
year 1789, at which period it attracted but little notice, and the species 
was soon lost." 
Sir Joseph Paxton, in " A Practical Treatise on the Cultivation 
of the Dahlia " (1838), tells us : " We are informed from indisputable 
authority that this plant was first introduced into this country from 
Spain by the Marchioness of Bute, so early as 1789, but, as it was not 
subsequently heard of, it is supposed to have been lost shortly after 
this introduction." 
Nine years later George W. Johnson, in " The Dahlia, its Culture, 
Uses, and History " (1847), says the same thing in almost the same 
words. 
In "The Dahlia: its History and Cultivation" (1853), the late 
Dr. Robert Hogg, too, tells his readers : " The first account we have 
of its introduction to this country was by the Marchioness of Bute 
in 1789 from Madrid, where the Marquis was then residing as 
ambassador from England to the Court of Spain." The reader will 
see later that this story is nothing short of fabulous. 
When Shirley Hibberd published his series of " Garden 
Favourites " in 1857 one 01 them was devoted to " The Dahlia." He 
records the mythical introduction in the following words : " The Dahlia 
is a native of Mexico, and was first introduced to Britain in 1789, the 
then Lady Bute procuring plants from Madrid, whither they were 
first sent from the Spanish possessions." This is really worse than the 
previous statement, for the then Lady Bute was a different person 
from the one subsequently known as the Marchioness. 
There now occurs a great gap in independent Dahlia literature. 
From the date of Shirley Hibberd's treatise in 1857 down to the year 
1897, a lapse of forty years, when " The Dahlia : its History and 
Cultivation " appeared in a series called " Dobbie's Horticultural Hand- 
books," there was no separate treatise published on that flower. In 
this work there is a chapter by Richard Dean, headed " History of 
the Dahlia " ; the details given are meagre and reveal no fact of 
historic interest beyond' those related by Shirley Hibberd in a paper 
read by him at the National Dahlia Society's Centenary Conference in 
1889, and to which attention will be drawn more fully in a subsequent 
paragraph. It is in the work last cited that we find the remarkable 
statement that the Pompon Dahlia was raised in 1808, "when Hartwig 
of Karlsruhe obtained a double variety from the single scarlet Dahlia 
coccinea," a statement which I have shown in a recent article in the 
" Gardeners' Chronicle " has no foundation in historical fact. In this 
