Sunflower

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Sunflower

Common sunflower (Helianthus annuus ) Annual plant with large, composite flowerheads. Only important native plant to be first domesticated in the U.S.--by Midwest Indians for food and by Hopis for dye. Many medicinal uses. Sunflower seed oil main commercial use today, especially in Russia. Many varieties grown worldwide today.

More than 100 species of sunflowers grow in the wild, all from the New World and most of them in North America. Here we focus on a single species, Helianthus annuus, the common annual sunflower which occurs in every "lower 48" state of the United States and is especially abundant west of the Mississippi River. Everywhere in the West. Wild sunflower seeds were an important source of food for Indians living in prehistoric times. At least one group of Indians in the Midwest discovered how to cultivate sunflowers more than 3,000 years ago, and over the years that knowledge was passed on to other Native Americans living in the Southwest and in Mexico. The sunflower has the distinction of being the only important crop plant to have been domesticated in what is now the United States.

Sunflowers are related to daisies, asters, marigolds and dandelions--all members of a huge family of plants known as composites. A sunflower is not a single flower at all, but rather a whole bouquet of flowers jammed together in a head made up of golden outer flowers called rays that encircle the tightly packed central brownish or purple disk flowers. There may be a hundred or more individual ray and disk flowers in each head. Only the disk flowers develop into seeds, technically called achenes.

Across the country the early european explorers of America found Indians gathering wild sunflower seeds for food, and in some regions they saw sunflower plants being cultivated along with corn, beans and squash. During their historic trek across America to the Pacific Ocean in the early 1800s, Lewis and Clark recorded in their diaries how the seeds were pounded and rubbed between smooth stones to make a kind of flour or meal. Well to the south of the route of Lewis and Clark, Paiute Indians living near the Grand Canyon would roast the seeds, then grind them into a fine flour to make cakes and mush. This was a nutritious food, for sunflower seeds are rich in calories, iron, vitamin-E and other essential nutrients.

Native Americans also discovered that sunflower plants were useful in treating a variety of ailments. Dakota Indians made a broth of sunflower heads for a drink to relieve chest pains. Pueblo Indians of the Southwest used plant parts to cure rattlesnake and spider bites as well as for healing cuts and other wounds. More recent folk and herbal medicine uses include the control of pain, inflammation, coughs and a host of other remedies.

Hopi Indians still grow a particular variety of single-headed sunflower that is tall, slender with dark leaves, and has a thin, dark purple seed that requires a longer growing season to mature than other local varieties. This sunflower is prized for the brilliant blue, purple, black or red dye that is made from the hulls and used to dye wool, cotton and baskets, as well as for making ceremonial body paint.

Today, sunflowers are being commercially grown everywhere in countries with temperate climates. Not for food, medicine or dye, but for the oil that can be extracted from the seeds. Sunflower oil has become the world's second most important vegetable oil and is used for cooking and to make margarine, salad dressing, lubricants, paints and soaps. More than half the world's cultivated sunflowers are grown in Russia and its surrounding countries where plant breeders in the 1930s through 1950s developed sunflower varieties with seeds containing nearly half oil and flower heads exceeding a foot in diameter. Kansas may be the Sunflower State, but Russia is the Sunflower Capital of the World.

Did you know? The sunflower itself is a splendid ecological niche - a whole world to tiny creatures. Some summer day take a look at a sunflower stalk and you will see that it hosts black ants, ladybugs, spiders, bees, butterflies, aphids and other miniature animal-life, all very busily traveling about their mini-world of stalks and flowers.

Heiser, Charles, 1981 The Sunflower. University of Olkahoma Press, Norman.

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