National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 6/Our State Flowers/The Sunflower

The Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.)


It is fitting that such a genuinely American Commonwealth as Kansas should choose a genuinely American flower to represent it at home and abroad. And the sunflower is such, for the Old World's eyes never fell upon it until the days when the exploration of the New World began. The Incas of Peru and the Hurons of our own country alike were enjoying it as a cultivated crop when the white man first visited them. They used it much as the bamboo growers use the bamboo—as a Jack of all Services. Its seeds they found useful alike as food and as the raw material of a home-made hair oil; its petals were utilized in the manufacture of a yellow dye; its leaves served them as fodder and from its stalk they secured their thread.

The sunflower, along with the goldenrod, the black-eyed susan, the asters, and many others, is a member of the composite family, the Napoleons of finance and industry in the flower world. If there were politics and politicians among the flowers, there would be a lively campaign against the “trusts,” for the composites seem bent upon a monopoly of the nectar business. They are efficiency experts, knowing how to crowd hundreds of blossoms into a single head, with brilliant ray flowers at the edge to attract their insect customers. It has been estimated that one-ninth of all the flowering plants of the earth have joined the composite group, and that it includes in the United States and Canada alone more than 1,600 species.

The wild sunflower is the one that gave Kansas the title of “The Sunflower State.” Its range extends from the Atlantic seaboard, through Kansas, and from the Northwestern Territory to the Gulf of Mexico.

Like the potato, which is the world's most productive food crop, like maize, which has marched to the ends of the earth, and like the tomato, which has come to enjoy a place all its own in the culinary establishments of civilization, the sunflower is a native American gone forth to render rich recompense to other nations and other continents for the plants they have given us. In China its fiber is used as an adulterant of silk; in southern Russia the seeds are widely employed both in making oil and as a substitute for our peanut. The pocketful of sunflower seed plays the same rôle in some parts of Russia as the bag of peanuts here. Much of the sunflower oil produced in Russia is used in making soaps and candles. Europe, Asia, and Africa all cultivate this plant.

When the Spaniards first visited Peru they found the sunflower as much the national flower of the Incas as it today is the State flower of Kansas. The Incas gave it a deeper reverence because of its resemblance to the radiant sun. In their temples the priestesses wore sunflowers on their bosoms, carried them in lieu of tapers, and otherwise used them in their services. The Spanish invaders found many images of sunflowers wrought with exquisite workmanship in pure virgin gold. These wonderful images, among many others, helped to excite the cupidity of the conquistadors and thus to bring about the downfall of the Incas.

In North America there are about 40 known species of sunflower. South America has about 20 species that do not exist on our own continent.

Source: —, ed. (June 1917), “Our State Flowers: The Floral Emblems Chosen by the Commonwealths”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(6): 494–495. (Illustration from page 508.)