Sunflowers, or Nearly So

There are lots and lots of summer-blooming yellow wildflowers out there which look sunflowers but aren't, or are but aren't well known, or used to be but, strictly speaking, aren't anymore, or clearly aren't, but could be if we wanted them to be. The Bidens genus of the Aster Family (Asteraceae) is one such group of wildflowers with a lot of sunflower near misses and wanna-bes.

I encountered one member of this genus in an Ohio wetland. It was Nodding Bur Marigold (B. cernua). While its flowers were a little small for a sunflower - up to two inches wide - they none-the-less had that sunflower thing going on, with six to eight ray flowers surrounding a darker yellow disk. (The ray flowers are sometimes absent, but they weren't in the one I found.) The entire plant grows to three feet tall, which is also is a little shorter than what most folks consider a good sunflowery height.

It is mainly a coastal species, growing in swampy, or wet ground from Nova Scotia down to North Carolina. It is much more localized further inland. It's known as Nodding Bur Marigold because, as the flowers age, they begin to nod.

A close cousin, Tickseed Sunflower (B. aristosa), does a much better job of appearing to be a sunflower. While its flowers are about the same size as those of Nodding Bur Gold, the plant gets up to five feet tall, which is an altitude more typical of many sunflowers. Its leaves, however, are pinnately divided, which isn't very sunflowery at all. In fact, the leaves bring to mind Rudbeckia species rather than any Helinathus, which are the "true" sunflowers.

Tickseed Sunflowers prefer wet meadows and roadsides and fields left to their own devices. They can be found from New England down to Virginia, west into Texas, and up into Missouri and Minnesota. I found them growing along Hogback Rd. near my home in Ohio.

Other Tickseed Sunflowers include B. coronata and B. polylepis.

Smooth Bur Marigold (B. laevis) is a second Bur Marigold species.

Out west, the sunflower look-alikes are much more successful at fooling us. They have big, bright, sunflowery yellow blossoms worthy of any Helianthus, and certainly many wildflower novices have been fooled. But these species - in this case Arnica and Wyethia - are much shorter - up to three feet tall in the most extreme cases - and often grow in dense patches, covering entire hillsides. Not very sunflower-like at all, but perhaps more breathtaking.

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