Sunflowers are summertime! When we think of a sunflower, we picture a tall yellow head eventually full of black seeds, right? But did you know there are yellow sunflowers and dark purple sunflowers? Did you know there are 70-some varieties of sunflowers? Google taught me that the sunflower originated in North American and spread to Europe in the 1500s. Sunflowers can be divided into three types: tall, dwarf and colored. They were (and are) mostly cultivated for food, oil or birdseed. Mostly we like them in our garden because they scream summer.
Native Americans, about 3000 BC, first domesticated the plant
into a single headed plant with a variety of seed colors. Commercialization of
sunflowers took place in Russia. By 1880, U.S. seed companies were advertising
the ‘Mammoth Russian’ sunflower in catalogues. Google will teach you way more
about the history of this flower than you’d ever imagine.
Do sunflowers figure into your family history???
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