Every flower loves the sun, but helianthus is the one and only true sun queen. Her orange/yellow head is always turned towards the sun, and when the sun has gone down; her eyes look to the east, waiting for her darling to come back in the morning. In honor of the summer, we would like to tell you more about helianthus in this product profile.
 

ORIGIN

When a sunflower is growing, it looks like the head turns with sun so that the sunflower can soak up every bit of sunlight during the day. But in fact, the growth of the stem varies depending on the time of day. By day time, the part of the stem that faces east grows faster, and from night fall the west side of the stem grows faster. This varying stem growth makes it looks like the flower turns with the sun. A full grown sunflower can grow up to 60 to 400 centimeters tall. Full grown sunflowers no longer turn with the sun, as their stem is no longer growing. The sunflower ‘freezes’ facing east. So they can warm up faster and therefore attract more insects such as bees, that love a nice and warm flower.

The common name of helianthus is ‘sunflower’, which is a literal translation of ‘helianthus’. In ancient Greek ‘helios’ means ‘sun’ and ‘anthos’ flower. Helianthus belongs to the enormous astraceae family (composite family), which is one of the biggest plant and flower family’s out there. Within the helianthus genus. There are about 70 species within the genus, most of which are from North America. Around the sixteenth century the sunflower was taken to Europe by Spanish explorers. In Europe the flower was mainly used as decoration, but this changed during the eighteenth century. At this point people found out that oil could be made from the sunflower seeds. Especially Russia went crazy for sunflower oil. Currently they are, together with neighboring country Ukraine, the biggest sunflower producers of the world.