Fat supplier to the North American Indians
The North American Indians grew the sunflower quite early as a food crop. They used the oil-containing seeds to fortify the food with fat.
also read
- Interesting facts about the leaves of the sunflower
- The structure of a sunflower
- The sunflower - a profile
During archaeological excavations in North America, the researchers found particularly large ones Kernels of sunflowerdated to several thousand years ago. They conclude from this that the indigenous indigenous peoples already cultivated the sunflower as a food plant.
The sunflower is still a symbol of the US state of Kansas today.
Ornamental plant of the Incas
Among the Incas, the sunflower was primarily worshiped as an image of their god.
The Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzaro made this observation at the beginning of the 16th century. Century.
The Incas kept the flower as an ornamental rather than a crop, presumably because they had a wide variety of other fatty plant species at their disposal.
Use as an oil supplier in Europe
The kernels of the sunflower were used as a substitute for coffee or for baked goods soon after their spread in Europe. Only in the 19th In the 19th century, the sunflower gained its current importance as an oil supplier.
Since then it has been cultivated industrially in many countries for the production of sunflower oil for food purposes, as an industrial oil and for medicinal oils. The oil is considered to be particularly healthy because of its high content of unsaturated fatty acids. The main growing areas are:
- China
- United States
- Russia
- Ukraine
- Western European countries
Popular garden plant
The sunflower is not only a common crop in this country planted.
Since planting and care are not laborious and the sunflowers get along well with the local climate, the flower has become one of the most popular garden plants.
Tips & Tricks
The botanical name of the sunflower Helianthus anuus is derived from the Greek words Helios = sun and Anthus = flower. Anuus means that the plant is annual. Presumably, however, the Greek plants are of a different species than the ornamental and useful plants known today as sunflowers.
