Posted on Tuesday, December 08, 2009 by admin in ANNUALS |

On the Inside with Jacqueline Heriteau: Everything’s Coming Up Sunflowers

Everything’s coming up sunflowers for 1996! They’re everywhere! On hats, on skirts, scarves, shawls, and shirts, on greeting cards, postcards, and magazine covers. Even the posh twentieth anniversary edition of ‘Pacific Horticulture’, a prestigious little literary quarterly has given its cover to sunflowers. So it’s not a great surprise to discover that the National Garden Bureau has named 1996 the ‘Year of the Sunflower!’ 

I can think of two good reasons for the grand surge in popularity of this sunny American native. Good reason one is that small varieties are being marketed that branch beautifully and produce dozens of charming small cutting flowers that have captured the imagination of gardeners and florists alike. However, you may love giant sunflowers, those straight-up, ‘Jack-in-the-beanstalk’ stems never did fit very comfortably into the typical flowering border. They usually have been grown in the kitchen garden. Many of the new varieties are charming in the garden, and some have dazzling new colors.

An example of the new form and a new color is the variety ‘Floristan’, which was introduced in 1994. It’s a fabulous bi-color whose petals are rusty red with yellow tips surrounding a dark central disk. The plant is just three feet tall and the branches about eighteen inches long. The flowers are six inches across, and ready for cutting just nine or ten weeks after the seed has been sown.

The shortest, earliest, of the new breed sunflower is ‘Big Smile’ which grows to 12 to 14 inches and produced flower in 50 to 60 days. The most adorable one I’ve seen photos of is ‘Teddy Bear’, a two-footed that produces six-inch fully double dwarf sunflowers. It’s small enough to grow in a container. I searched the garden catalogs piled by my desk and found seed for it offered in the Thompson & Morgan Inc. catalog. (Thompson & Morgan Inc., PO Box 1308, Jackson NJ 08527-0308.) There probably are others like it being marketed under different names.

Two other new colors offered by the catalogs are ‘Italian White,’ and ‘Sunbeam.’ You’d grow these plants as cutting flowers rather than in a border. ‘Italian White’ is not all that small, four feet at least, but it branches and produces a profusion of the four-inch flowers that are ivory white shading to an inner ring of gold, that surrounds a deep chocolate central disk.

‘Sunbeam’ is a beautiful flower with bright clear green eye ringed by a golden yellow petals. They’re about five inches across, on six-foot plants that do not branch. Its great value to the florist trade, and to the home garden with a cutting garden, is that it is pollenless. Sunflowers produce a pollen that can be as difficult as lily pollen to get rid of.

The new sunflowers wouldn’t have become quite so popular if they weren’t so gosh durn easy to grow. Sunflowers have been thriving here for eons, literally. According to the National Garden Bureau, sunflowers were grown as food plants on the Western Plains 5,000 years ago. The first breeders appear to have been the Ozark Bluff dwellers. They selected seed whose plants produced more seed than other sunflowers. The seeds were dried then ground into flour for bread making. They were also served with other vegetables.

As early in our history as 1568 Spanish explorers decided the sunflower was something to write home about, which they did, and sent seeds. By 1616 the sunflower had become a popular ornamental in British gardens. Eventually they were being grown for the seeds all over Europe. The people who were most interested were the Russians. During Lent and Advent members of the Holy Orthodox Church of Russia were not allowed to use foods rich in oil. So the Russians bred very tall sunflowers with huge heads filled with seeds from which they extracted oil. Apparently eating foods cooked in sunflower oil did not break the Church laws.

Sunflower collectors (there are more around than you suppose) used to go to great lengths to find and grow Russian seeds because they’re the tallest sunflowers of all – eight and ten feet tall. Now the American seed catalogs sell a variety called ‘Russian Giant’ which has been selected for size – eight and ten feet. Like marigolds, dandelions, black-eyed Susans, and (surprise!) lettuce, sunflowers belong to the Composite or daisy family. There’s not a finicky plant in the bunch as long as there’s plenty of direct sun. The fascinating thing about the giant sunflower is that you can almost see their great heads moving with the sun, which they do follow from East to West. The genus name, Helianthus, comes from two Greek words, helios, sun, and anthos, flower. Give a child a few seeds of ‘Russian Giant’ to plant; seeing those tiny seeds sprout giant plants with all the ease in the world is a consciousness-raising experience. Not only do they soar with no trouble at all, but they’re also the original smiley face.

In this ‘Year of the Sunflower’, try them yourself. Sow the seeds after all danger of frost has gone by, and the air is warming up a little. They will need five to ten days to germinate. If you grow sunflowers for the seed heads, expect to have a little tussle with the birds. When they start visiting, cover the head with cheesecloth. When the back of the flower is dry and brown, the seeds are ready to harvest. Remove the flower with one to two inches of stem, and hang it to cure in a warm dry place. When the seeds are completely dry, a brisk go at them with a stiff brush will encourage the seeds to fall out. Don’t wash them. Store them in an air tight container in the refrigerator.