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Sunflower: Garden Giant

© Audrey Stallsmith

The proud giant of the garden race,
Who, madly rushing to the sun's embrace,
O'ertops her fellows with aspiring aim,
Demands his wedded love, and bears his name.
Charles Churchill-Gotham, Book I

The sunflower is HUGE, not only in size and present popularity, but in terms of its many uses. Native Americans cultivated helianthus thousands of years before Christ in the region that later became the Plains States, as well as in Peru and Chile. The Aztecs decorated their sun temples and temple priestesses with its flowers and hammered out images of those blooms--in pure gold.

Helianthus derives, in fact, from the Latin helios ("the sun") and anthos ("a flower"). Its round rayed blooms do appear to be a down-to-earth depiction of that heavenly body. And its late summer shades of gold, orange, rust, and brown provide a fitting preview of the autumn splendors to come. In Vanity Fair, Thackery described those flowers as being "as big as warming-pans, that are fit to stare the sun itself out of countenance."

The idea that the blooms turn their heads to follow the heavenly orb, however, probably derives from old descriptions of another light-lover, calendula. The sunflower is said to raise its large face when rain threatens, however!

Its flashy beauty is far from being its only asset. Native Americans ground sunflower seeds for both flour and oil. They also painted textiles and their bodies with yellow and purple dyes extracted from the plant's blooms and leaves. Although American settlers virtually ignored the gentle giant as a common weed, Europeans greeted its introduction to their shores in the 1500's with enthusiasm.

Gerard rhapsodized of one plant that "in one summer, beeing sowne of a seed in Aprill, it hath risen up to the height of fourteene foot in my garden, where one floure was in weight three pound and two ounces, & crosse overthwart the floure by measure sixteen inches broad." He also provided an excellent description of the flower's center, writing that it "is made as it were of unshorn velvet, or some curious cloath wrought with the needle: which brave worke, if you do thorowly view and marke well , it seemeth to be an innumerable sort of small floures. . ."

The sunflower proved especially popular in Russia, since the Orthodox church allowed use of its oil during Lent-when many other fats were forbidden. In War and Peace Tolstoy speaks of fleeing soldiers "filling their bags and knapsacks with wheaten flour and sunflower seed." Russia was soon growing the plant commercially, and exporting its oil to all parts of Europe. To this day, most breads baked in Germany contain sunflower in some form.