This sunflower quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the plant from root to seed head. There is botany (why the 'flower' is really hundreds of tiny florets, why young heads track the sun and old ones face east, why the seeds spiral in Fibonacci numbers, how tall the record-holder grew), history (domestication by Native Americans, the Spanish voyage to Europe, how Russian Lent turned it into an oil crop), food and farming (confectionery versus oil seeds, sunflower butter, why baseball players chew the seeds, which two countries grow half the world's supply), and culture (Kansas, Ukraine, Van Gogh's Sunflowers and the tomato-soup protest, the Vegan Society, the hidden-disabilities lanyard, Taiwan's Sunflower Movement). About half the questions are easy enough for a garden club or a classroom plant unit; the rest will make a keen gardener or a botany student pause. It works as a summer round for a quiz night, a Kansas or Ukraine themed evening, or a solo test. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia, Guinness World Records and other reference pages, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the scientific name of the common sunflower?
Helianthus annuus
The genus name is Greek for sun-flower and the species name is Latin for yearly, since it lives and dies in a single season.
Q 02The genus name Helianthus is built from two Ancient Greek words. What do they mean?
Sun and blossom
The same 'helios' root gives us helium, first detected in the light of the sun before it was found on Earth.
Q 03Sunflowers belong to which plant family, one of the largest on Earth with more than 32,000 species?
The daisies
Lettuce, dandelions, artichokes and chrysanthemums are all cousins; together the family makes up about a tenth of all flowering plants.
Q 04What is often called a sunflower's 'flower' is really what?
A head made of many tiny flowers
The outer 'petals' are ray florets and the dark centre is packed with disc florets, each one a complete five-petalled flower that can produce a seed.
Q 05Which sunflowers actually track the sun across the sky during the day?
Only immature buds and young plants
Once the stalk stops growing the head locks into place, and it usually ends up facing east to catch the morning warmth.
Q 06In which compass direction do most mature sunflower heads end up facing?
East
The daily swing of the young plants is driven by a circadian rhythm, and it carries on even when clouds hide the sun.
Q 07The counts of left-turning and right-turning spirals in a sunflower seed head typically form what kind of pair?
Successive Fibonacci terms
Each floret sits about 137.5 degrees round from the last, the so-called golden angle, and that packing produces pairs like 34 and 55 or 55 and 89.
Q 08A typical garden sunflower reaches roughly what height?
About 3 metres
The stem is rough and hairy, and the biggest leaves, near the bottom, are usually heart-shaped.
Q 09How tall was the tallest sunflower ever recorded, verified by Guinness World Records in September 2025?
10.9 metres
Alex Babich grew it in Fort Wayne, Indiana; at 35 feet 9 inches it would peer over the roof of a three-storey house.
Q 10Where is the common sunflower considered native?
Central and western North America
Its wild range runs from southern Canada through the central and western United States into northern Mexico.
Q 11Roughly when was the sunflower first domesticated in the Americas, according to the earliest evidence?
Around 2600 BCE
That makes it older as a crop than many Old World staples, and it may have been tamed in Mexico and in the eastern United States independently.
Q 12Some Native American groups planted sunflowers as a 'fourth sister' to which famous trio of crops?
Corn, beans and squash
The tall stalks on the north side gave the other crops shelter without shading them from the southern sun.
Q 13Which Europeans first carried sunflower seeds back across the Atlantic, in the early 16th century?
Spanish explorers
Q 21Sunflower seed spread is often used in schools as a substitute for what?
Peanut butter, for nut-allergic children
It is made the same way, by grinding roasted seeds, and it turns an alarming green in baked goods because chlorogenic acid in the seeds reacts with baking soda.
Q 22Besides cooking, sunflower oil is used to make margarine and which fuel?
Biodiesel
Refined sunflower oil has a smoke point of about 232 °C, which is why it is a favourite for deep frying.
Q 23After the Chernobyl disaster, sunflowers were floated on a contaminated pond to do what?
For a couple of centuries it stayed a garden curiosity in Europe before anyone thought of pressing the seeds for oil.
Q 14Sunflower oil became hugely popular in 18th-century Russia largely because of what?
Church rules on fasting during Lent
The Orthodox Church allowed only plant fats during Lent and the sunflower was not on the list of banned oils, so it filled the gap and Russia turned it into an industrial crop.
Q 15Which two countries together produce more than half of the world's sunflower seeds?
Russia and Ukraine
The pair supplied about 51 percent of the 54 million tonnes grown worldwide in 2022, which is why the war between them rattled cooking-oil prices around the globe.
Q 16The sunflower is the national flower of which country?
Ukraine
In June 1996 American, Russian and Ukrainian officials planted sunflowers at the Pervomaysk missile base to mark the removal of the country's Soviet nuclear warheads.
Q 17Which US state is nicknamed 'The Sunflower State' and has the sunflower as its state flower?
Kansas
Its motto is Ad astra per aspera, 'to the stars through difficulties', and it is also called the Wheat State.
Q 18Striped-hulled sunflower kernels sold for snacking are known in the trade as what?
Confectionery
The solid-black-hulled ones are the oil type, and they are also what goes into most bird-feeder mixes because the shells are thin and the fat content high.
Q 19Once the hull is removed, what is the edible part of a sunflower seed called?
The heart
Dried kernels are about half fat and a fifth protein, and a 100-gram serving carries more than twice the daily value of vitamin E.
Q 20Players of which US sport famously chew sunflower seeds as an alternative to tobacco?
Baseball
The dugout floor carpeted in spat shells is one of the game's less glamorous traditions.
Draw radioactive elements out through their roots
The technique is called rhizofiltration; the plants take up caesium and strontium and can then be harvested and disposed of, and a similar campaign followed the Fukushima meltdown.
Q 24For which expected guest did Van Gogh paint his 1888 sunflower vases to decorate a room in his Yellow House in Arles?
Paul Gauguin
The visit ended badly: after nine weeks of quarrels Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear and Gauguin left for Paris.
Q 25A Van Gogh Sunflowers sold at Christie's in March 1987 for a then-record price of roughly how much?
About 40 million dollars
The buyer was Japanese insurance magnate Yasuo Goto, and the picture now hangs in the Sompo Museum of Art in Tokyo.
Q 26In October 2022, climate activists threw what at Van Gogh's Sunflowers in London?
Tomato soup
The painting was behind glass and only the frame was slightly damaged; the two protesters then glued their hands to the wall.
Q 27Which vegetable, despite its name, is actually the tuber of a sunflower species native to North America?
The Jerusalem artichoke
The 'Jerusalem' is thought to be a mangling of girasole, the Italian word for sunflower; the tubers store inulin instead of starch, which is why they are notorious for causing wind.
Q 28Which British airport created the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower lanyard in 2016?
Gatwick
The green lanyard and yellow flower were chosen to suggest confidence and growth; more than three million have since been handed out worldwide and Lego has made minifigures wearing one.
Q 29In which country did students occupy the legislature for three weeks in the 2014 'Sunflower Movement'?
Taiwan
The protesters were fighting a trade pact with China; a florist donated a thousand sunflowers and the movement took the flower as a symbol of hope because it turns toward the light.
Q 30The sunflower is the emblem of which organisation, founded in Britain in 1944 by Donald Watson?
The Vegan Society
Watson coined the word 'vegan' by taking the first three and last two letters of 'vegetarian', and the society's sunflower trademark has certified products since 1990.