Sunflower Trivia

• Sunflower heads consist of 1,000 to 2,000 individual flowers joined together by a receptacle base. The large petals around the edge of a sunflower head are individual ray flowers which do not develop into seed.

• Cultivated sunflowers have only 1 flower or head on each plant.

• There are 2 kinds of sunflowers grown in Kansas: confection sunflowers which are used for human consumption & bird feed and oilseed sunflowers which are used as oil for human consumption & meal in livestock feed.

• The sunflower is phototropic when the plant is in the bud stage, meaning that it tends to follow the movement of the sun from east in the morning to west in the afternoon. Once the flower opens, most sunflowers face east.

• The sunflower is the state flower of Kansas.

• Mount Sunflower is Kansas’ highest point at 4,039 feet.

• A sunflower is ready to harvest when the back portion of the head turns brown.

• There are 50 species and 19 subspecies of sunflowers found in the United States.

• Most oilseed sunflower varieties are the result of hybridization. This means insects are not required for pollination of the flowers, even though they may be helpful.

• Floating rafts of sunflowers are being used to clean up water contaminated as a result of the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the former Soviet Union. The roots of the sunflower plants remove 95% of the radioactivity in the water by pulling contaminants out of the water.