COMMON SUNFLOWER 



Helianthus annuus L. 



Summer The sunflower, said the ancient Greeks, is Clyte, a sea nymph 

 Roadsides who fell in love with the sun, was changed into a sunflower, 

 and forever follows the daily movements of the sun across 

 the sky. The American sunflower, a tall and splendid native plant, does 

 as the Greek sunflower did thousands of years ago, and usually keeps 

 its face turned toward the sun as it moves over the sky. 



The annual sunflower, largest and most useful of its tribe, originally 

 was native west of the Mississippi; much later it was made the state 

 flower of Kansas. But more than four hundred years ago, the western 

 Indian who moved across the Mississippi took sunflower seeds with them. 

 Gradually, through the centuries, the sunflower A\-as planted or escaped 

 from Indian plantings, until it had reached Lake Huron, where Samuel 

 de Champlain found it when he came to the American wilderness around 

 the Great Lakes. He found that the Indians made a textile flber from 

 the stems, the leaves were used for horse fodder, the seeds for food and 

 for oil, and from the flowers a yellow dye was made. Tlie sunilower 

 for many years has been one of the most useful of the plants known 

 to the Indians and remains useful \u today's economy. 



In their flower heads, the sunflowers possess a tremendously compli- 

 cated seed-producing mechanism. The so-called petals are yellow rays. 

 The sticky brown, resinous, scented center or disk is composed of hun- 

 dreds, sometimes thousands, of complete flowers which produce yellow 

 pollen and erect pistils which eventually fnll away and reveal a l)ending 

 head of ripe, fat-filled, vitamin-rich sunflower seeds, food for Indian, 

 cardinal, or barnyard fowl. 



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