45 Fun Facts About Sunflowers

What is the scientific name of the common sunflower?

Helianthus annuus is the common sunflower; wild plants branch into many heads, but Native American farmers bred the crop into a single-headed plant.

Sunflowers belong to which plant family, one of the largest on Earth?

The daisies, or Asteraceae, include the dandelion, whose roots people roast and brew as a caffeine-free coffee substitute.

What is often called a sunflower's 'flower' is really what?

A head made of many tiny flowers: each one in the dark centre can ripen into a seed, which is why a single head yields so many seeds.

Which artist filled Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2010 with over 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds?

Ai Weiwei invited visitors to walk on the seeds, but within days Tate fenced them off after warning that the porcelain dust could harm health.

In which compass direction do most mature sunflower heads end up facing?

East: once a sunflower stops growing, its head stays turned toward sunrise and warms quickly in the morning, which draws more pollinator visits.

The counts of left-turning and right-turning spirals in a sunflower seed head typically form what kind of pair?

Successive Fibonacci terms reached Europe through Fibonacci's 1202 book Liber Abaci, which used them to count how many rabbit pairs one pair could breed in a year.

In which 2009 game do sunflowers produce the 'sun' that players collect and spend?

Plants vs. Zombies began as a sequel to PopCap's fish-tank game Insaniquarium, until designer George Fan swapped its alien invaders for zombies.

In the original French Tintin books, which character's surname is Tournesol, meaning sunflower?

Professor Calculus, Tournesol in French, sold his shark-submarine design and used the money to buy Marlinspike Hall for Captain Haddock.

Seeds claimed as the oldest domesticated sunflowers were found at San Andrés, an archaeological site in which country?

Mexico: the San Andrés seeds from Tabasco date to about 2600 BCE, though other researchers soon challenged the identification in the same journal.

Some Native American groups grew sunflowers as an extra 'sister' beside which famous trio of crops?

Corn, beans and squash were the Three Sisters: cornstalks served as poles for climbing beans, while broad squash leaves shaded the ground and held back weeds.

Which Europeans first carried sunflower seeds back across the Atlantic, in the early 16th century?

Spanish explorers took the seeds home, but Europe grew the plant mainly as a garden curiosity until it reached Russia, where farmers turned it into an oil crop.

What helped make sunflower oil hugely popular in imperial Russia?

Church rules on fasting during Lent forbade butter and lard, but sunflower oil was not on the banned list, so Orthodox Russians could cook with it right through the fast.

Botanically, what kind of fruit is a sunflower 'seed'?

An achene is a dry fruit holding a single seed, so the striped hull is really the fruit's wall. The specks on a strawberry are achenes too, each one a whole fruit.

The sunflower is the national flower of which country?

Ukraine treats the sunflower as its national flower; in June 1996 American, Russian and Ukrainian ministers planted sunflowers at the Pervomaysk missile base to mark the removal of its Soviet nuclear warheads.

Which US state is nicknamed 'The Sunflower State' and has the sunflower as its state flower?

Kansas made the wild sunflower its state flower in 1903, in a law that praised it as 'a flower that a child can draw on a slate'.

Striped-hulled sunflower kernels sold for snacking are known in the trade as what?

Confectionery is the trade term for the large, striped-hull seeds sold for snacking; the smaller black-hulled oil type has thinner shells and a higher fat content.

Once the hull is removed, what is the edible part of a sunflower seed called?

The heart is the trade name for the kernel left once the hull is cracked away; processors sell hearts raw or roasted, and bakers fold them into bread.

Players of which US sport are famous for chewing sunflower seeds during games?

Baseball players took up sunflower seeds as a substitute for chewing tobacco, which a 2016 labour deal barred every new Major League player from using.

Sunflower seed spread is often used in schools as a substitute for what?

'Peanut butter, for nut-allergic children' is what it replaces: SunButter is made the same way, by grinding roasted seeds, and it turns green in baked goods when chlorogenic acid meets baking soda.

Besides cooking, sunflower oil is used to make margarine and which fuel?

Biodiesel is made by reacting the oil with methanol, because raw vegetable oil is far thicker than diesel and leaves deposits that wear an engine out.

After the Chernobyl disaster, sunflowers were floated on a contaminated pond to do what?

Soak up radioactive metals: sunflowers on floating rafts dangled their roots in a pond near the plant, pulled caesium-137 and strontium-90 out of the water, and were then disposed of as radioactive waste.

A Van Gogh Sunflowers sold at Christie's in March 1987 for a then-record price of roughly how much?

About 40 million dollars more than tripled the auction record, held by a Mantegna; the price spiral that followed carried another Van Gogh, Irises, past it within eight months.

In October 2022, climate activists threw what at Van Gogh's Sunflowers in London?

Tomato soup hit the glass at the National Gallery on 14 October 2022; the painting was unharmed, the frame slightly damaged, and the two Just Stop Oil activists glued themselves to the wall.

Which vegetable, despite its name, is actually the tuber of a sunflower species native to North America?

The Jerusalem artichoke is a sunflower's tuber: 'Jerusalem' is thought to be a mangling of girasole, Italian for sunflower, and the tubers store inulin rather than starch, hence their reputation for causing wind.

What does wearing a sunflower lanyard signal to airport staff?

Hidden disability: the lanyard, first handed out at Gatwick Airport in 2016, tells staff the wearer may need extra time or help, and nobody has to disclose a condition to get it.

In which country did students occupy the legislature for three weeks in the 2014 'Sunflower Movement'?

Taiwan: students held the Legislative Yuan from 18 March to 10 April 2014 against a trade-in-services pact with China, and a florist's gift of sunflowers gave the movement its name.

The sunflower is the emblem of which organisation, founded in Britain in 1944 by Donald Watson?

The Vegan Society took the sunflower as its emblem; Watson described 'vegan' as the beginning and end of 'vegetarian', and the society's sunflower trademark has certified products since 1990.

When a wasting disease killed most of California's sunflower sea stars from 2013, which prey boomed and stripped the kelp forests?

Sea urchins multiplied unchecked once their many-armed hunter vanished, so scientists began breeding sunflower sea stars in captivity, hoping to return them to the sea and revive the kelp.

Sunflower oil is an especially rich source of which nutrient?

Vitamin E: one tablespoon of sunflower oil supplies over a third of an adult's daily need, and the antioxidant is in the seed to stop its fats oxidising and turning rancid.

Sunflowers are often called 'allelopathic', meaning they do what?

They release chemicals that suppress other plants, at least when sunflower extracts are tested in the lab; gardeners blame the hulls when little grows under a bird feeder, but field results are mixed.

Why do farmers like sunflower cultivars bred with drooping heads?

'They reduce bird damage' is the main reason: a head hanging face-down is harder for birds to perch on and pick at, and it also sheds rain that would otherwise rot the seeds.

What controls the daily swing of a young sunflower's head?

'A circadian rhythm synchronised by the sun' drives it: one side of the stem grows faster by day and the other by night, and the swing persists for days under constant light.

Which French explorer found a sunflower's edible tubers growing on Cape Cod in 1605?

Samuel de Champlain found people at Nauset Harbor growing the tubers and took them to France, where by the mid-1600s they were widely eaten and fed to livestock.

Traditional sunflower oil is richest in which kind of fat?

Polyunsaturated fat, chiefly linoleic acid, makes up well over half of the traditional oil; it oxidises readily, so breeders developed high-oleic sunflowers whose oil stays stable without hydrogenation.

A year before his famous vases, Van Gogh painted four Paris still lifes showing sunflowers how?

Cut and lying flat, the heads were painted close up in 1887, and a fellow painter liked the pictures enough to trade one of his own canvases for two of them.

Post Malone and Swae Lee's 2018 hit 'Sunflower' came from which animated film?

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has Miles Morales sing along to 'Sunflower', which Swae Lee said the hero uses to calm himself down; the single topped the Hot 100 in January 2019.

What do botanists call the sterile, petal-like parts around the rim of a sunflower head?

Ray florets have no stamens or pistils, which is why the showy rim never sets a seed; every seed comes from the small disk florets packed in the centre.

In 2020 sunflower oil ranked fourth in world output; which vegetable oil ranked first?

Palm oil: an oil palm yields several times as much oil per hectare as a field of sunflowers, which is how it outproduced soybean, rapeseed and sunflower, in that order, in 2020.

Which Italian star searches for her missing soldier husband in the 1970 film Sunflower?

Sophia Loren plays Giovanna, who refuses to accept that her husband died on the Russian front, travels to the Soviet Union and finds him alive with a new wife and daughter; Vittorio De Sica directed.

Each new sunflower floret forms about 137.5 degrees round from the last, a turn set by which famous number?

The golden ratio is as far from a simple fraction as a number can get, so florets turned by it never line up into arms with gaps between them, and the head fills evenly.

Which Victorian art movement, championed by Oscar Wilde, adopted the sunflower?

The Aesthetic Movement's passion for sunflowers, lilies and peacock feathers made it an easy target: Punch cartoons and Gilbert and Sullivan's 1881 opera Patience both sent the craze up.

Himawari, the Japanese word for sunflower, is the name of Japan's long-running series of what?

Weather satellites: the Himawari series has watched from high above the equator since 1977, and its pictures travel well beyond Japan, since Australia's Bureau of Meteorology builds its own satellite images from them.

Broomrape, a weed with no chlorophyll, ruins sunflower crops by latching onto which part of the plant?

Roots: a broomrape seed sprouts only when it detects a sunflower root nearby, then plugs into the root's plumbing and draws off water and nutrients.

Whose 1597 Herball says he 'could never observe' sunflowers turning with the sun?

John Gerard wrote that he had tried to find out the truth of it, and about open flowers he was right: only young, growing sunflowers swing through the day, while a head in bloom stays put.

Which Romantic poet addressed a short lyric to a sunflower 'weary of time'?

William Blake printed the poem in Songs of Experience in 1794: his flower, tired of counting the sun's steps, longs for the 'sweet golden clime' where the traveller's journey ends.