Sunbonnet

“ This is a slender-stemmed, graceful, showy-flowered Sunflower, common in damp woods and on the borders of thickets, from Me., Quebec, and Minn. southward. The branching stem grows from 2 to 5 feet tall; it is slightly hairy-rough on the upper portions but smooth below. The leaves are thin, rather rough-broad lance-shaped, short-stemmed and grow oppositely on the stem; they are all sharply saw-toothed. The showy flowers, growing on slender peduncles from the ends of the branches, are 2 to 3 inches across. Though often with ten rays, they just as frequently have any number from 8 to 15. ”

“ The great sunflower, that grows into a giant in a single season and defies the summer sun and storm, falls an easy victim to the frosts of autumn. It, however, prepared the way for many successors, in the ripened seeds, each one of which when given favorable conditions will germinate, grow, reproduce its kind, and thus finish another cycle in the realm of vegetable life. The bean-plant, in a different way, climbs its appointed pole, enjoys the same sunshine and shower, produces its blossoms, fills long pods with ripened seeds, and gives up its life like all its fellows in the field. ”

“ They do, and the daisy, and the marigold, and the zinnia, and the aster, and your lettuce, too, Davy, and many, many more. Whenever you see a flower with a round bunchy center and a rim of petals, like a sunflower—no matter what color or how small it is—you will know it belongs to the Composite Family. I suppose there are more of this family in America than in any other country, but the sunflower is the finest of them all, and the most generally useful. Its seeds are full of fine oil, and are excellent food for cattle and poultry. The Indians sometimes use them for bread. ”

“ So that I am not yet prepared to follow the example of the old lady who never allowed one flower in her garden to be cut, and filled her glasses with artificial Roses! Sunflowers are sprouting round their strong stems, and surrounded thus by constellations of smaller suns, are perhaps even handsomer than before. We have two curiosities of Sunflower at this moment—curious as demonstrating a resolve to exist and flower under any circumstances whatever. One is a large thick-stemmed plant, which must have met at some time with some violent discouragement ”

“ There is also a sort of majesty in the one strong single stem, from which proceeds so fine a show of buds, and flowers, and leaves. Yet I have never been happy enough to see her act the part of the poet’s Sunflower—the real Sunflower of our earthly gardens could never turn her head so fast; all that I know she does is to bloom on whichever side of her the sun rises. Poets, nevertheless, are the true seers, and without doubt they know what they say. ”

“ On prairies west of Pennsylvania to South Dakota, Missouri, and Texas, the SAW-TOOTH SUNFLOWER (H. grosse-serratus) is common. Deep yellow instead of pale rays around a yellowish disk otherwise resemble the tall sunflower's heads in appearance as in season of bloom. The smooth stalk, with a bluish-hoary bloom on its surface, may have hairs on the branches only. Long, lance-shaped, pointed leaves, the edges of lower ones especially sharply saw-toothed, their upper surface rough, and underneath soft-hairy, are on slender, short petioles, the lower ones opposite, the upper ones alternate. ”

“ Sunflower family. Size: Perennial, 1 to 21⁄2 feet tall.
The large, solitary, coarse flower heads with their yellow petals make the Sunrays among the most impressive composites of the desert.
Flowers rise on stout stems above a luxuriant growth of leaves that make the plants appear almost egotistical in their elegant arrogance.
They are at their best in sandy washes and on dry slopes at elevations between 1,000 and 3,500 feet, often where other plants seem too hard pressed eking out an existence to produce the garish foliage and bloom achieved by the Sunray. ”

“ So the plant can move its leaves about as much as an animal can move its head; only it moves very much more slowly. But the sunflower, grown out of doors, can wag its head fast enough to keep up with the sun. Indeed, it is called the sunflower, not so much because its blossom looks like the sun, as because, in the morning at sunrise, it bends its tip over toward the east so that the rising sun shall strike the upper sides of its leaves, follows the sun around thru the sky all day, and in the evening finds itself with all its upper leaves facing west. ”

“ Don’t be swindled out of that wonder of beauty, a single snowdrop; there is no gain and plenty of loss in the double one. More loss still in the double sunflower, which is a coarse-coloured and dull plant, whereas the single one, though a late comer to our gardens, is by no means to be despised, since it will grow anywhere, and is both interesting and beautiful, with its sharply chiselled yellow florets relieved by the quaintly patterned sad-coloured centre clogged with honey and beset with bees and butterflies. ”

“ Sunflower seeds are the peanuts of this people, unaccustomed, as they are, to candy. Shy children met on the highways, overcoming their shyness, and falling into step by your side, offer you little handfuls of sunflower-seeds drawn from their stuffed pockets.{228} And when men or women go on long journeys afoot they always take with them a supply of these seeds to munch by the way. As one chats with the sunflower harvesters, the bright figures of the clover-seed gatherers flit in the upland-climbing clover fields ”

“ Early settlers in Canada were not slow in sending home to Europe so decorative and useful an acquisition. Swine, poultry, and parrots were fed on its rich seeds. Its flowers, even under Indian cultivation had already reached abnormal size. Of the sixty varied and interesting species of wild sunflowers known to scientists, all are North American. Moore's pretty statement,
"As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
The same look which she turn'd when he rose,"
lacks only truth to make it fact. ”

“ The sunflower, even, does not follow the sun by a mechanical law, but, growing by a fair, bright sheet of water, looks as constantly at that shining surface for the beloved light as ever did the fabled Greek boy at his own image in the fountain. The tendrils of the vine seek and choose their own support, and the thirsty spongioles of the root find the nourishing veins of water. Growth, says a naturalist, is the conscious motion of vegetable life. But this theory of kinship, imperfect in the plant, becomes plain and distinct in the animate creation. ”

“ With ice a mile thick it is half a ton to the square inch, and the quantity of water produced increased accordingly.
Economic Value of the Sunflower.—The common sunflower is a native of tropical America, and there it sometimes attains the extraordinary height, for an annual plant, of twenty feet. It thrives in nearly every region of the inhabitable globe. In the south of Europe and in the northwest provinces of India it is cultivated to a considerable extent. ”

“ I think those wise men, perhaps, never saw the wild western sunflowers, but only the big tame ones that have heavy, coarse stems and are so big and clumsy and fat that they couldn't well turn, even if they wanted to. I have seen whole fields of wild sunflowers—little ones like yours, and long before they were in bloom—with every stem bent toward the sunrise, when there was not a breath of wind blowing; and I have seen the same flowers straighten their little stems as the sun rose higher, and then bend them again to the west in the evening ”

“ The heads of Sun Spots are yellow throughout and bloom all summer. The plants are 2-5 ft. tall and grow on prairies and foothills at 5000-7000 ft.
Sunflower Helianthus petiolaris Plate 39, fig. 7
One scarcely needs an introduction to the cheery Sunflower which overruns roadsides and fallow fields everywhere at 3000-8000 ft. The plants are 2-5 ft. tall and bear flowers all summer. This species is the western form of the common sunflower, Helianthus annuus. ”

“ If, as we are told, one ninth of all flowering plants in the world belong to the composite order, of which more than sixteen hundred species are found in North America north of Mexico, surely more than half this number are made up after the daisy pattern, the most successful arrangement known, and the majority of these are wholly or partly yellow. Most conspicuous of the horde are the sunflowers, albeit they never reach in the wild state the gigantic dimensions and weight that cultivated, dark-brown centred varieties produced from the common sunflower have attained. ”

“ Soil and Cultivation.—The Sunflower will thrive in almost any soil or situation, but succeeds best on land adapted to the growth of Indian Corn. It is always grown from seed, which should be sown in April, or the beginning of May, in drills three feet apart. When the plants are well up, they should be thinned to a foot asunder, and afterwards cultivated in the usual manner; stirring the ground occasionally, and keeping the plants free from weeds. The flowers appear in July, and the seeds ripen in August and September. ”

“ That is to say, no sunflower would produce seed with its own pollen, even though it came from a different head. Here was a dilemma; there was, so far as we could tell, only one plant of the red sunflower in the world, and this could not be self-fertilized! The only thing to do was to make crosses with ordinary sunflowers, and see what would come of it. It must now be explained that, aside from the color of the rays, there are many kinds of sunflowers. ”

“ We do not sit under our own fig-tree (nor, alas, our apple-tree) , but why should we sigh when each summer the sunflower springs up to a height of twelve or fifteen feet? It is the palm-tree of the north, only more beautiful.
The Mormons on their exodus from Illinois to Salt Lake City sowed sunflower seeds along the trail, and ever since it has been marked by sunflowers. In the province of Saskatchewan, the Russian refugees sometimes divide their fields by rows of poppies. In Manitoba, their hedges are of sweet-peas ”

“ Good roses—not, however, the perfect flowers of the connoisseur or even of the cottage exhibitions of England—may be had from early June until the first week of July, but the hybrid tea roses that brave the latter part of that month and August are but short lived, even when gathered in the bud. Those known as summer bedders of the Bourbon class, chiefly scentless, of which Appoline is a well-known example, are simply bits of decorative colour without the endearing attributes of roses, and garden colour may be obtained with far less labour. ”

“ A rather straggling shrub, about two feet high, with whitish, woody stems, pale reddish twigs, and bright green leaves, which are roughened with minute prickles on the margins and under sides, but look quite shiny. The flower-heads are over half an inch long, in western Arizona usually without any rays, and are not especially pretty, like a starved Sunflower whose rays have shrivelled away in the dry heat of the desert, but the effect of the foliage, which suggests little apple leaves, is decidedly attractive in the arid sandy places it frequents. ”

“ Cultivation of Sunflowers.—The history of the cultivation of the sunflower in Russia is easily written, for it was begun in 1842 by one Bokareff, at Voronezh, for the purpose of making oil from the seed. It has now extended to the adjacent provinces in the Volga basin, so that the acreage in sunflowers increased from 367,800 acres in 1881 to 704,500 acres in 1887. Sunflowers with small seeds are cultivated for the oil, and those with large seeds for eating the seeds as nuts. The oil is extremely nutritious, and has a pleasant flavor. ”

“ It is a commercial source of rubber but is not yet profitable, as the plants are of slow growth.
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COMMON SUNFLOWER
Common Sunflower (Helianthus annuus) has been known in cultivation for many years but is considered native from Minnesota to Texas and Mexico. It is the state flower of Kansas. The stout, erect stems are widely branched above the base and are very sticky, 2-10 feet high. The flower heads, 3-6 inches broad, have many yellow ray flowers about an inch long and numerous tubular disk flowers. It is grown commercially for its fiber and seeds. ”

“ The Sunflower grew up very tall, and produced a flower which always turned to the sun, from the time of his rising in the east to his setting in the west, and thus drew into itself such floods of golden light, that at last this devoted flower came to resemble somewhat the sun it worshipped. ”

“ Although a sun-bonnet is picturesque, it is hot and close, for it keeps off the air as well as the sun. The old-fashioned plan of putting a couple of cabbage leaves in the crown of the hat is not to be despised, should the heat be felt very much. ”

“ A list of such plants will at once indicate that there is a field of enterprise for the practitioner of spring flower gardening; and while cheap and effective materials are thus brought into the service, there is no interference with the later summer bedding, because, if the annuals are well managed, they will give their plentiful bloom when the garden is most in need of colour, and may be cleared off in time to make way for the plants that are generally employed in the summer display and which are known as ‘bedding plants’ par excellence. ”