This was named in honour of Anders (Andreas) Dahl (1751–89), the Swedish botanist and physician, by the Spanish botanist Antonio José Cavanilles (1745–1804) in 1791. Dahl was born in Varnhem, Västergötland, Sweden, the son of the preacher Christoffer Dahl and his wife Johanna Helena Enegren. He was one of the co-founders of the ‘Swedish Topographic Society in Skara’ in 1769 (aged 18). Dahl studied medicine at the University of Uppsala, where he was a student of Carl Linnaeus, but did not finish his studies for financial reasons. He worked with Claes Alströmer (of Alstroemeria) in his botanical garden near Gothenburg, collecting plants and travelling widely. Dahl received an honorary degree in medicine from Kiel in 1786, and became associate professor and botanist at Turku University in 1787. Here he published his Observationes botanicae circa systema vegetabilium divi a Linne (Botanical observations on the Linnaean system of plant classifi cation, 1787). The majority of his herbarium was destroyed by fire in 1827, but parts survive in Helsinki and Edinburgh. Dahl tried (unsuccessfully) to keep Linnaeus’s herbarium in Sweden in 1783 when it was purchased by Sir James Smith for the Linnean Society of London. His friend, the botanist Carl Thunberg, named a plant Dahlia crinita (now Trichocladus crinitus) in his memory in 1792 (crinita is Latin for long hair in reference to Dahl’s long beard). His Horologium florae (a floral clock) was published posthumously in 1790.

Has a gene which gives it resistance to mildew and this gene has been successfully transplanted into aubergines