Sunflowers: Majesty, Mystery and Math

Attack of 40 foot sunflowers in Italy, Van Gogh's $40,000,000 sunflower paintings, mathematical equations of spiraling florets; Helianthus annuus are filled with tradition, splendor and mysteries of the universe. This zealous introduction to Earth's most cheerful resident may seem a surprise considering it was declared a "noxious weed."

The United States has a complex love affair with Sunflowers, from being the state flower of Kansas to being an enemy of the state in Iowa's weed declaration in 1972. Some sources put the sunflower's earliest presence in the U.S. on the plains of Tennessee around 2300 BC, others as early as 3000 BC in Arizona and New Mexico. Perhaps the earliest evidence of sunflowers has been found in Mexico, as far as cultivation of the flower. From the Aztecs and Incas to the Native America tribes of the north, Sunflowers were worshipped as solar deities and for their many uses like food and oils.

Sunflower Oil can be used like any cooking oil and to this today continues its popularity for its healthy essence. You can find sunflower oil in the numerous varieties of Lay's potato chips, Sun Chips and Kettle Chips. While European explores may not have foreseen endless aisles of chips in grocery stores, they returned from their escapades in the Americas with sunflower seeds. The flower eventually made its way to Russia, where Sunflower oil became a fixture of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 18^th century.

The oil from Sunflowers was coveted because it was the only oil used in foods not forbidden during the Russian Orthodox Lent. Under the expansive rein of Peter the Great in 18^th century Russia, sunflowers found tremendous popularity, for oil and as ornaments. Their popularity in Russia was so great that over 2 million acres were dedicated to sunflowers, and it became the national flower. Even as political boundaries veered all over the map, Russia's neighboring Ukraine also holds the sunflower as a national symbol.

Reaching across Asia, the sunflower claimed another national symbol as the official flower of the city of Kitakyushu in Japan. It is in Japan, at the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, that sunflowers also claim a worthy title. It traces back to the 19^th century where the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh created a series of sunflower paintings. A century later, an ambitious Japanese businessman paid a record $39,921,750 for one of the sunflower paintings. The painter himself has been noted as saying that the sunflower is something of his trademark, like Monet's Water Lilies.

A flower with so much history leaves one to wonder what is so alluring about the Sunflower. Visually the flower's large blooming head leaves no mystery as to why it is called the Sunflower. Yet, while the ancients may have offered the flower as a symbol of sun worship, the flower itself seems to naturally worship the sun. Sunflowers partake in the phenomenon, first described by Leonardo Da Vinci, of Heliotropism. As the word implies; Helio (Sun) and tropism (turning), Sunflowers turn towards the sun. There is a common belief that fields of sunflowers turn their heads in unison with the Sun's path, like a beach full of yellow sun bathers. The truth is sunflowers only enact heliotropism in the bud stages, and wild sunflowers rarely turn towards the sun except for their leaves.

The flower is no less majestic even though we can't imagine fields or full grown sunflowers doing the sun dance. Full-grown they can be too; with the largest recorded sunflower grown in the Netherlands at 25 feet, 5.4 inches, according to a 2004 Guinness world record. An even larger sunflower, whether or not a tall tale, was recorded in Italy in 1567 towering at a height of 40 feet.

The sunflower's majestic size holds yet an even more mystical trait in the universe's mysteries. Whether 2 inches or 20 feet, all sunflower heads are encoded with a mathematically beautiful manifestation of florets. The tightly packed florets that spiral within a sunflower head adhere to one of the most profound mathematical phenomena, The Golden Ratio. Specifically in sunflowers, it is called Fermat's spiral, which occurs in Fibonacci numbers. Without running a tangent of mathematically theory here, the Golden Ratio has captivated mathematicians since the Ancient Greeks. In its simplest explanation; the Golden Ratio is a mathematical constant that is irrational and appears in nature and art alike as a near perfection. It is the mathematical representation of what we visualize as beauty, which is why sunflowers may be so visually captivating.

Sunflowers have trotted their beauty around the globe, grown in Russia, Argentina, Europe, China, India, Turkey, South Africa and America. In the U.S. sunflowers are grown in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Texas and California. This cultivation of course includes the commercial growth of sunflowers for cut flowers and for the food industry with seeds and oils.

Mainstreet Flower Market in Parker, Colorado has Colorado grown sunflowers on special this week.