Native Americans cultivated sunflowers for centuries before Europeans arrived on the continent. The Inca used the sunflower as a motif on many of the gold artifacts at their most important temple, Coricancha, dedicated to the sun god Inti.
Spanish conquistadors destroyed the temple, took the artifacts, and, in their greed, even held a grudge against the Inca’s vast fields of sunflowers because they, as it turned out, were not made of actual gold. It’s for this reason; Mandy Kirkby tells us in her Victorian Flower Dictionary that in Spain, sunflowers are a symbol of false riches.
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Of course, sunflowers are a huge source of riches for the whole ecosystem. What other plant can grow as well in farmers’ fields as it can in cracks in the pavement and still be such a great source of food for humans, birds, bees, and butterflies alike? Within a century of those conquistadors bringing sunflower seeds back to Europe, bakers were using the seeds in bread and even roasting them as an alternative to coffee.
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Today sunflowers are cultivated across North America for livestock feed and sunflower oil, among many other things. And what would Major League Baseball be without sunflower seeds for players to snack on?
If you could see UV light, as bees do, sunflowers would appear very high contrast with dark petals toward the center. [4] It’s basically a bee billboard: “Come and get some yummy pollen, little guys!”
Any art history majors in the crowd? You’ve probably studied Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck’s “Self Portrait with Sunflower” [5], where blooms score even more real estate than the painter’s face does.
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And we can’t forget Vincent Van Gogh’s obsession with sunflowers! Van Gogh painted plenty of still-lifes of sunflowers at his studio in the south of France. His friend Paul Gaugin even painted a portrait of Van Gogh at work on one of these canvases. [6] Some scholars think Van Gogh’s “yellow period” was a result of him was taking the medication digitalis [7], which has a side effect of giving the world a yellow tint. If that’s true, imagine how incredible Provence’s fields of sunflowers must have looked to him!
Helianthus annus, the most common type of sunflower, is the state flower of Kansas. There’s a popular legend that Mormon men, striking out from Missouri for points west, planted sunflowers along their path through Kansas and Colorado so that the women and children who followed the next year could find their way.
Sunflowers indeed grow along many roads throughout the American plains, but this story is actually from Willa Cather’s beloved novel My Ántonia. The narrator tells us: “I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake’s story […] Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.”
We can’t argue with that symbolism, even if it is rooted in mythology.
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