Sun + Flower = Sunflower!
Sunflower (Genus - Helianthus)
This summer we had so little rain that our usual crop of hardy, rangy, wild sunflowers was small, concentrated in one spot--hugging the raised beds (to the dismay of the tomato vines).
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Even in dry years, they pop up everywhere in the Rio Grande Valley--brightening up yards, fields, ditches and roadsides in August and September. But where did they come from? What is their history? What is interesting or noteworthy about them?
As a random start, I took Sandra Knapp's gorgeous coffee table tome, Plant Discoveries, off the shelf and blew off the dust. I struck gold right off! She has an entire chapter on Sunflowers and Daisies! 11 plates. She is nothing if not one of the foremost western botanical scholars of our day, so I should not have been surprised when the first page of her essay buried me in the scientific names for a massive pile of flower parts: composite, inflorescence, capitulum, floret, fused and elongate, peripheral ray florets, phyllaries, modified bracts, receptacle, sepals, and pappus. And to explain how the familiar sunflower seeds are arranged, she makes a digression into Fibonacci (Pisa 1170-1240/50) and his mathematical recipe for elegant shell and flower spirals.
Sunflowers are part of a massive composite family, Asteraceae. Aster from the Greek for "star". 25,000 cousins: daisies, sunflowers, thistles (including artichokes), dandelions and chrysanthemums. (1) They originated in the "New World" and were cultivated by early peoples in Mexico and the U.S. ~5,000 years ago for use as food, as a purple dye and as a snakebite treatment.
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| From "Getting to the Roots of Sunflower Cultivation" The Aztecs purportedly used them in religious ceremonies. |
According to the National Sunflower Association, "This exotic North American plant was taken to Europe by Spanish explorers some time around 1500." (2) It spread throughout present-day Western Europe mainly as an ornamental, but was also valued for its seeds. "By 1716, an English patent was granted for squeezing oil from sunflower seed." (SunflowerNSA)
While the Spanish were enjoying them in their gardens, and the English experimenting with their squeezing devices, the Russians dove headlong into large-scale commercial production. Apparently Peter the Great (1682–1725) was very fond of The Low Countries, and spent quite a bit of time there learning the craft of shipbuilding, with the goal of modernizing his homeland. Always on the lookout for interesting new things, he fell in love with sunflowers and brought back seeds. According to Oleg Yegorov, in "Why are Russians obsessed with sunflower seeds":
In 1829, a peasant from the region of Voronezh (300 miles south of Moscow) built a press that wrung the oil out of sunflower seeds – and it was an instant hit. Sunflower oil proved to be less expensive than other vegetable oils, so by the end of the 19th century, it was the most popular type of oil used by Russians. (3)
Not only was it cheaper, but it was a tasty alternative for Lent. The Russian Orthodox Church had a lengthy list of oily foods which could not be consumed during the high holidays: the sunflower was a freebie! (SunflowerNSA)
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| https://www.kuriositas.com/2011/08/strange-history-of-sunflower.html |
In the 1880s, these new varieties "Mammoth Russian" sunflowers found their way back across the ocean (probably brought by immigrants and perhaps hyped by American seed sellers). (SunflowerNSA).
From the New World, to the Old, and back again! The homespun plants in our back yard are part of an old, diverse group of that is surprisingly well-traveled.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_sunflower
https://www.sunflowernsa.com/all-about/history/
> Our nameless author
cites: Albert A. Schneiter, ed. Sunflower Technology and Production,
(The American Society of Agronomy No. 35, 1997) 1-19. Note: I checked through the online resources of UNM Library, but could not find an electronic version of the article.
https://www.kuriositas.com/2011/08/strange-history-of-sunflower.html A blog by RJ Evans. Note: Nicely written, but no citations. So who knows?
Knapp, Sandra. Plant Discoveries: A Botanist's Voyage Through Plant Exploration. (US Edition.) NY: Firefly Books. 2003. pp. 190-205.
Yegorov, Oleg. (Aug 27 2019) Russia Beyond. https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/330874-why-russians-love-sunflower-seeds
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Notes
(1) Well, I sort-of struck gold. Knapps' trot through flower morphology and tidbits about Fibonacci were engaging, but when it comes to uncovering paths of migration and development, she actually explores Chrysanthemums, which originated on the other side of the globe, in China. What geography separates (New World wild sunflower ancestors vs. mum progenitors), taxonomy unites?
(2) Get your story straight!?!! - As I was poking around on the internet, there seemed to be huge differences in accounts about where and how long ago humans started cultivating sunflowers. I was puzzled. Some places said Tennessee, some Mexico and New Mexico? Reading through the post on kuriositas.com, he (RJ Evans) mentions the Aztecs. That made me curious enough to throw that into Google.
About Sunflowers and the Aztecs - Lo and behold, in spring of 2008, a group of researchers published a paper challenging the previous narrative which put earliest human cultivation of sunflowers in the Mississippi Valley ~3,200 ya. That version of events postulated that from there these bigger, beefier seeds were spread west and south by the early Spanish explorers. New evidence presented by David Lentz, et. al., points to 2 separate, independent sites where sunflowers were domesticated -- finding that they were cultivated and used in religious ceremonies by civilizations in Mexico much earlier - 4,600 ya.
New term: sunflower fruits aka seeds = (achenes)
(3) According to Yegorov, the Russians continue to produce sunflowers as a serious agricultural crop:
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The Rabbit Hole
More about the cultivation of sunflowers and pre-Columbian Mexico
Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) as a pre-Columbian domesticate in Mexico by Lentz, Pohl, Alvarado, Tarighat and Bye 2008 Apr 29
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2359819/
"Plants in the genus Helianthus, a relatively primitive Asteraceae group, arose in the southwestern United States during the Cretaceous period ≈50 million years ago (4). The wild diploid annual H. annuus has been flowering and setting seed for the past 500,000 to one million years (5), and during that time it has dispersed broadly across temperate North America. Today, wild sunflowers grow throughout most of the United States (6) and range as far north as southern Canada and as far south as the Transmexican Volcanic Belt in central Mexico (7). "
Ancient Sunflower Fuels Debate About Agriculture In The Americas - Science Daily. April 30, 2008 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080429075321.htm
Getting to the Roots of Sunflower Cultivation
https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111595 May 22, 2008
"Lentz's new research report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, confirms his earlier finding that sunflowers were domesticated twice, once in the eastern part of the Mississippi Valley about 3,200 years ago, and independently in Mexico about 4,600 years ago. It also stirs up past controversy surrounding the previous finding.
"Lentz and his co-authors argue that their recently reported discovery of three well-preserved achenes, the fruit of the sunflower that contains the seed, confirms early Mexican domestication.
"The achenes, discussed in the team's 2008 report, date from around 300 B.C., that is, 1,800 years before the Spanish Conquest of Mexico led by Hernando Cortez. The achenes, found in a dry cave in Cueva del Gallo, a site in the central Mexican state of Morelos, have unmistakable sunflower traits that blunt criticism of the previous San Andrés finding.
"We have the earliest fully domesticated sunflower seeds from Mexico at San Andres and also we have sunflower, huge seeds, from Cueva del Gallo," says Lentz. "A careful examination of the early Spanish literature about Aztec plant uses reinforces this idea, too. The more we look, the more we find. An independent domestication hypothesis is the best explanation for these facts."
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JSTOR Daily - Plant of the Month - Sunflower. Some gorgeous old plates and artwork.
https://daily.jstor.org/plant-of-the-month-sunflower/
Absolute treasure trove of a site where the article originally appeared.
Kristan M. Hanson and Lucas Mertehikian Sept 28, 2022 https://lab.plant-humanities.org/sunflower/
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