Big, bright, and bold, those sunflower blooms pack a powerful punch on any garden viewer. Add the fact that sunflowers bloom all summer long, are heat-tolerant, resistant to pests, and attractive to pollinators and birds, thus, many gardens everywhere have a stand of sunflowers.
Sunflowers are good and long-lasting cut flowers for bouquets and vases. And the sunflower seeds, dried and roasted, are great, cheap, and healthy snacks. Commercially, sunflower oil is one of the common kitchen staples and has found its way into homeopathy.
This afternoon, my wife and I and her Siberian forest cat, Paisley, visited a sunflower festival at one of Richmond's flower farms. Paisley was supposed to meet up with our daughter's two Siberian cats, Reinhardt and Perseus, and a few other Instagram cats for some quick location pictorials at the sunflower farm. Thus, a few of the photos in this blog article on sunflowers feature a couple of those cats, our Paisley and her new-found fashionista Siamese cat-friend, Olaf.
Paisley and Olaf and a few other Instagram cats meet up at the Sunflower Festival
Back to the sunflowers. The sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is an annual plant with a large daisy-like flower face. Its scientific name sounds Greek, for indeed it comes from the Greek words helios (“sun”) and anthos (“flower”); annuus is Latin for annual.
Sunflowers are heliotropic. That's a fancy word for the plant's ability to turn its flowers to follow the movement of the sun across the sky. Thus, flowers face the east in the morning and slowly face the west as the sun moves westward. After the sun sets, the flowers nod down and return at night to face the east, ready to welcome the morning sun. The sunflower's heliotropic characteristic occurs during the earlier stages before the flower grows too heavy with seeds. Quite an interesting characteristic of sunflowers, I must say.
Sunflowers are heliotropic, facing where the sun is, facing easterly in the morning, and westerly by sunset.
The most familiar sunflower is yellow or golden yellow. But the flowers can be multi-colored cream with pink to red coloration towards the center in Strawberry Blonde sunflowers, or of other colors like red in the sunflower Moulin Rouge, beige in Italian White sunflowers, and very dark red wine that almost looks black in the sunflower Chianti variety. Sunflowers can also be orange, maroon, brown, tan, and lemony yellow.
There are over a dozen main varietals of sunflowers. Almost all, however, have brown centers that ripen into heavy heads filled with seeds. These seeds are the source of our snacks, feeds for the birds, and oil for cooking and homeopathic medicines. The sunflowers’ centers also consist of dozens of small florets, each containing some pollen and nectar for the bees and butterflies.
Cultivators have come up with sunflowers of different heights, colors, bloom sizes, and to an extent, growing habits. So, now, gardeners and flower lovers have a good range of choices.
Greenhouse-grown sunflowers make it possible to have plants and blooms in the stores and florists as early as spring and as late as December. Stores sell one-foot blooming sunflowers and garden centers also carry sunflowers that tower several feet tall. Varietals have single stem giants, but most people prefer those with branching stems that hold many blooms in one plant. The more the merrier goes for sunflowers, too.
Over seventy varieties of sunflowers have been cultivated and hybridized. Except for a couple of species, the rest are native to North America and Central America. But only about fifteen major varieties are generally recognized by growers and gardeners.
The 15 main varieties of sunflowers can be grouped into the giants, the medium-height, and the dwarfs. I'll include five from each height variety.
GIANT SUNFLOWERS:
1 - American Giant sunflowers - up to 15 ft tall; most common in flower competitions; 1- foot wide, one single flower head supported by chubby stems, so rarely need staking; a newer hybridized variety
2 - Sunforest sunflowers - what's planted the most at the Sunflower Festival, to create a "wall" or "forest" for its sunflower maze
3 - Skyscraper sunflowers - 12 to 14 ft tall, 14-inch flower head on thick stalks; traditional sunflowers grown in home gardens
4- Russian Mammoth sunflowers - 9 to 12 feet tall; a favorite of pollinators like bees and butterflies; birds and squirrels love their seeds.
5 - Earthwalker sunflowers
- 6 to 9 ft tall; autumn-hued colors, like dark brown, red, earthly orange, and gold
MEDIUM-HEIGHT VARIETIES:
Sunflowers now come in many colors: red Moulin Rouge, very dark Chianti, multicolored Strawberry Blonde
1- Moulin Rouge sunflowers - 4 ft tall; burgundy red
2 - Chianti sunflowers - 4 to 6 ft tall; pollen-free; deep red wine petals
3 - Strawberry Blonde sunflowers - 5 ft tall; cream with pink to reddish petals toward the center
Italian White and the rare Schweinitz's sunflowers
4 - Italian White sunflowers - creamy petals; favorite of bees and butterflies; less crowded petals
5 - Schweinitz's sunflowers - 6 ft tall; bright yellow, well-spaced petals
DWARF SUNFLOWERS:
1- Pacino sunflowers - 12 to 16 inches tall; widely used for bouquets and flower arrangements
2 - Sundance Kid sunflowers - 1 to 2 feet tall; 1 to 1 3/4 feet petals colored red and fading to yellow
3 - Suntastic Yellow sunflowers - 1-2 ft tall; edible flowers, used in salad toppings and cake decorating
4 - Little Becka sunflowers - 1-2 ft tall; great for small gardens, planters, and boxes; sunshiny yellow flowers with an orange halo effect of their petals; their six-inch petals go from gold to crimson and back to gold again
5- Teddy Bear sunflowers - fuzzy
looking flower heads, almost covering the whole head except the small center; a double-blooming sunflower with a thick, bushy look and a very small center; sometimes called "Giant Sungold"
Most sunflowers produce ample pollen for pollinators, but there are also pollen-free plants that are best for bouquets. Some people do have sunflower allergies, so the new pollen-free varietals are a welcome relief and a favorite among florists and bouquet makers.
Farmers sometimes use sunflowers as rotation crops because sunflowers absorb toxic materials such as zinc, chromium, lead, arsenic, and copper, to name a few, in contaminated land. As a result, sunflowers allow other plants nearby to grow better and cleanse the land for subsequent crops.
This afternoon's sunflower festival and farm tour were truly enjoyed by the cats -- and their human consorts.
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