“A perfect beauty of a sunflower!
A perfect, excellent lovely sunflower existence! - Allen Ginsburg
October is a vision of blue skies and glorious foliage. In the garden the annual sunflowers, Helianthus annuus, stand with heavy, hanging heads. Goldfinches and chickadees flit about, feasting on the seeds. This year I allowed all the self-sown sunflower plants to grow where they sprouted and then planted more. The result was a forest-like garden with vegetables nestled among the sunflower stalks. By mid-September the small birds were replaced by marauding squirrels who ran up the stalks and devoured the seed heads, often snapping the plants with their added weight.
There are over 60 species of sunflowers native to North and Central America, and a few to South America. Our ubiquitous annual sunflower was developed for seed production, which was used for food, medicine, and dye by the Incas in present-day Peru. Archeological remains of harvested seeds have been uncovered from 3000 years ago.
The big seed sunflower is native to Peru, yet the most popular cultivar is known as ‘Russian Giant’ or ‘Russian Mammoth’. There is a fascinating explanation involving Tsar Peter the Great and the Orthodox Christian observation of Lent. Peter first visited the Netherlands in 1697 where he first saw sunflowers growing. He was quite impressed by the unique plants and sent seed back to Russia where they became popular. At some point people realized that the sunflower seeds were a good source of oil and the oil was not on the list of fats that were officially banned by the Orthodox Church during Lent. By the 1830s sunflower oil was produced on a large scale. Sunflowers were bred for bigger and oilier seeds and eventually became the ‘Russian Giant’. To this day sunflower seeds are a popular snack in the area and the sunflower is the national flower of Ukraine.
Russian immigrants brought the improved seeds back to the Western Hemisphere in the 19th century. By 1880 seed companies were offering the sunflower ‘Mammoth Russian’. Oil production in Canada and the United States increased and took a huge jump in the 1970s when concerns about cholesterol made sunflower oil attractive.
Sunflowers have been used at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and New Orleans to help in phytoremediation, a technology that uses plants to detoxify. They are hyperaccumulators, plants that absorb toxins, heavy metals, and radiation. Monks in Japan distributed 8 million sunflower plants after the contamination from the nuclear power plant meltdown. Chief monk Kobe Abe explained, “We plant sunflowers, field mustard, amaranthus, and cockscomb, which are believed to absorb radiation.”
In the last few decades breeding has produced a range of ornamental sunflowers. The ‘Mammoth Russian’ is still fun to grow for its massiveness and seed production, but the variety available is remarkable: multi-branched, double flowered, pink, apricot, white, burgundy, short, pollen-free. And the birds love them all.
“The yellow sunflower by the brook, in autumn beauty stood.” - William Cullen Bryant
The perennial sunflowers tend to flower from late summer into fall, with smaller, yellow blooms. One notable one is Helianthus tuberosus, the Jerusalem artichoke, or sunchoke. The common name is strange because the plant and its edible tubers have no connection to Jerusalem and are not related to the artichoke. The plants were called ‘girasole’, the Italian for sunflower by immigrants and some believe that was heard as Jerusalem. Others think it was food eaten in the New Jerusalem of some colonists. The French explorer, Samuel de Champlain, was introduced to the tubers by natives of Nauset Harbor on Cape Cod and sent them back to France claiming they tasted like artichokes. One drawback to consumption of sun chokes is the starch inulin, difficult to digest, causing flatulence; hence another nickname, the fartchoke. Back in 1597, early in their use in Europe, John Gerard wrote, “which way so ever they be dressed and eaten, they stir and cause a filthie loathsome wind within the body, thereby causing the belly to be pained and tormented, and are a meat more fit for swine than men.”
I used to grow Jerusalem artichokes but they are quite aggressive, invading more and more space, so they are gone. But I love the annual sunflowers, especially the branching varieties. ‘Italian White’ has a small, creamy flower with a dark center. ‘Teddy Bear’ has dense double golden blooms on 3 foot stalks; while ‘Sunburst Lemon Aura’ has 6 foot stems with branches topped by double lemony flowers. ‘Soraya’ produces many blooms with orangey petals and chocolate centers. But there must be a few of the ‘Russian Giant’ to soar toward the sky, open their discs to the sun, and then, in October, hang their heavy heads to signal the end of summer. Hopefully, a few seeds will escape the critters, drop to the earth, and sprout next spring to continue the cycle.
“The gaudy leonine sunflower hangs black and
Barren on its stalk,
And down the windy garden walk
The dead leaves scatter - hour by hour.” - Oscar Wilde
October 2020