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Summer Sunflowers
By Wauwatosa Public Library
Tuesday, Jul 1 2008, 09:25 AM
A popular choice for summer gardens is the sunflower (Helianthus Annuus). It’s easy to grow and the large flower with its distinctive rows of seeds is both beautiful and useful. Did you know that people have been growing sunflowers for over 5,000 years? Some archaeologists believe that the sunflower may have been domesticated even before corn.
Sunflowers were grown by Central American cultures in Mexico and Native Americans around the Mississippi valley. Spanish explorers took the exotic plant back to Europe sometime around 1500, where it became popular as an ornamental plant. Developing sunflowers as a commercial crop for oil and seeds began in Russia in the 1800s. By the 1900s, sunflowers had come back home to the United States and they were a lot bigger than they were when they left!
Native sunflowers have many small flowers and are considered a weed in some states. What most people think of as a sunflower today is mostly the result of breeding for seeds and oil. The cheerful face of a blooming sunflower has an undeniable appeal, as you can see on calendars, coffee mugs and in summer gardens everywhere. If you’d like to learn more, a great book on the history of sunflowers is Sunflowers: the unauthorized biography of the world’s most beloved weed by Joe Pappalardo.
