
Picture by Linda
There are 60 or more species of the Common Sunflower. The wild sunflower is small and opportunistic especially on roadsides and neglected areas. There was a field of cultivated sunflowers on my route several years ago. It was a beautiful sight to observe a whole field of huge bright yellow faces looking toward the morning sun as I went to work. As they matured, the heads were so heavy they all looked at the ground.
The flower is really a flower head or disk bearing hundreds of small individual flowers. Each seed of the mature flower was a small flower with stamens, anthers and pistils. The petals are actually part of a single "ray" flower whose function is to attract bees to the small cluster flowers.
The Incan Indians of Peru worshipped the Sunflower as a symbol of the sun. Priestesses would wear necklaces of sunflowers made from gold.

The Sunflower by Vincent Van Gogh was painted in 1888. The bright sunlight of South France inspired this familiar work. The blossoms are in three stages, newly emerged, wilting, and some dying. Traditionally in Dutch painting, this symbolizes the three stages of life. This information was taken from Painting the Weather web site.
The city of Goodland has a reproduction of one of Van Gogh's other famous sunflower paintings. Canadian artist Cameron Cross sold the town the idea for $150,000 and the Easel was dedicated in August 2001, during Goodland's Sunflower Festival. I posted a picture in our travel journal several weeks ago.