It's dahlia season! One of my favourite flowers.
A bit like succulents, I think it's the beautiful and perfect symmetry of the petals that appeal to me so much. Hugely popular in wedding work recently, the dahlia is named after an 18th century botanist named Anders Dahl who first regarded them as vegetables (the edible tubers) rather than flowers! Before the discovery of insulin in 1923, diabetics were given a substance called Atlantic starch, derived from Inulin, a natural form of fruit sugar taken from dahlia tubers...fascinating!