4 Facts Tell the Vicious Truth About Sunflowers

• gardening
• plants
• biology

1. Sunflowers are Hard to Kill

We're talking about wild sunflowers here, which are to long-necked, human-bred sunflowers what coyotes are to pug dogs. Wild sunflower seeds are adapted for living in the Great Plains of North America, and are smaller and tougher than the kind baseball players devour inside dugouts. They can remain viable for as long as 10 years because of this hard seed coat. Early sunflower industrialists spent many long years breeding sunflowers that produced seeds with thinner coats. They also react well to environmental stress. Graduate students all over the world water sunflowers with saline or grow them in shallow soil to observe them prosper despite the conditions—growing small and flowering quickly to give the next generation a better chance to breed and spread.

2. Sunflowers are Promiscuous and Incestuous

Not every species is eager to cross species to form hybrids, but in this regard sunflowers are pushovers. A bee transferring pollen from one species of sunflower to another could be unwittingly creating a new hybrid by swapping genes. Forming these unions is how sunflowers can spread and thrive in extreme environments, like salt marshes and sand dunes. Ornamental and industrial breeders take advantage of this pliant attitude to create new colors, sizes, oil content and seed size. In another bit of strange sexual horseplay, the stigma of a sunflower is known to sometimes bend to make contact with its own pollen, where it self-pollinates. Wild sunflowers do this less often than domesticated ones.

3. Industrialized Sunflowers War Against Other Crops

Soy and sunflowers share some common use as cooking oil and are grown in the same areas. (Canola and palm oils also crowd the market.) So of course they are in a fight for crop space on farms. Soy has risen in prominence, partly because soy seed vendors developed a genetically engineered plant that has been altered to resist herbicide, so that less is needed to deter weeds. The price potential rose and sunflowers lost ground. While using gene sequencing to breed useful sunflower traits into farm plants was fine, the market for bioengineered sunflowers has been hurt by concerns (bolstered by some field work) that the frisky sunflowers will flow their bio-tech modified genes off the farms and into sunflower weeds.

4. Hitler Wanted Stalin's Sunflowers

Commodity envy is a dirty thing, but it is also often a contributing cause for war. Adolph Hitler's Germany was scarred by famines it suffered during World War II, courtesy of blockades. Food shortages could not be ignored, and it was clear proof that Hitler's international policy had negative consequences. By taking the Rhineland in 1936, Hitler seized its factories and industrial resources, and he wanted his economic revival by conquest to continue. Russia had plenty of resources, including sunflower fields and oil pressing plants, and, in July 1941, Germany invaded Russia. A 1942 New York Times article details what Hermann Goering was telling the German people they were getting from the invasion. The Nazi propagandist "offered hungry Germans the vast sunflower fields of the Kuban as a solution to their fat problem." He wasn't lying. IG Farben took control of the Russian sunflower plants and shipped seeds and oil back to Germany while the war raged. As the Germans began to yield ground and their supply lines broke down, they used sunflower oil to fry doughnut-like treats and Wehrmacht literature recommends using it to lubricate MP40 submachine guns on the Eastern front.

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