Arizona's Symbol of the Sun

Photos and story by Doyen Salsig Nature's greatest extravagance in Northern Arizona is her profusion of sunflowers in the summer months. They border every dirt road and train track, they spring out of cracks in cement to soften the severity of man's structures, they shield the ugliness of shacks and refuse heaps, and vast prairies become seas of gold.

Our sunflower is the same Helianthus anuus which is the state flower of Kansas. Growing wild, it can be as small as 10 inches high, struggling out of a barren heap of red cinders, or up to 10 feet in a hospitable ditch. But it is such a useful plant that it is widely cultivated, and then is shoots up stalks 15 feet high, weaving and drooping under the weight of giant flowerheads, whose disks can scarcely be spanned by a man's hand. Its seeds are little packets of nourishment for man and birds, besides producing a fine oil. The blossoms yield a prized honey, and even the leaves are good for fodder. Hopi Indians extract yellow, purple, and black dyes from its flowers and seeds, for their baskets and textiles.

Sunflowers: they look like symbols of the sun. But there is another reason for their name. The old song, "Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms," says: The sunflower's face so faithfully follows the sun across the sky that the photographer who wants a backlit picture must settle for the back of the flowerhead. Not only the flower, but the whole stem turns with the sun, to continually expose as much leaf surface as possible.

Like all members of the Composite family, the sunflower is really a myriad of tiny flowers in one compact head. A cup of green bracts, the receptacle, supports a ring of yellow ray flowers, each actually five petals fused together, around the tubular purple-brown flowers of the disk, which grow in a curious mathematical sequence of opposing spirals. The deeper you look into the sunflower, the more wonders unfold.

Blossom time in the high country starts in June, when the sheets of gold begin to unroll along roadsides and across meadows, and to cascade down mountain slopes. September frosts pluck the petals from the flowers, but they are lovely even in death as the soft tawny heads sink slowly back to the earth.

"A common and very conspicuous weed," sunflowers are called in Arizona Flora. Yes, they are weeds, these shining miniature suns, which paint the whole countryside gold and even come in to grace our towns this magnificent largesse of Arizona's summer. ☐☐☐ "No, the love that has truly loved never forgets, But as truly loves on to the close; As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets, The same look which she turned when he rose."

TO SUNFLOWERS

Yellow flower, yellow flower growing by the trail, Yellow flower, yellow flower so beautiful, so frail, Always giving, always giving of thy fragrance and beauty, Would that man, in his wisdom, see thy beauty, sense his duty, To conquer nature is such a blunder, one cannot help but stop and wonder, How beautiful the world would be, if you were man and he were thee.