Its flowers,
even under Indian cultivation had already reached abnormal size.
Of the sixty varied and interesting species of wild sunflowers
known to scientists, all are North American.
Moore's pretty statement,
"As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
The same look which she turn'd when he rose,"
lacks only truth to make it fact. The flower does not travel
daily on its stalk from east to west. Often the top of the stem
turns sharply toward the light to give the leaves better
exposure, but the presence or absence of a terminal flower
affects its action not at all.
Formerly the garden species was thought to be a native, not of
our prairies, but of Mexico and Peru, because the Spanish
conquerors found it employed there as a mystic and sacred symbol,
much as the Egyptians employed the lotus in their sculpture. In
the temples the handmaidens wore upon their breasts plates of
gold beaten into the likeness of the sunflower. But none of the
eighteen species of helianthus found south of our borders
produces under cultivation the great plants that stand like a
golden-helmeted phalanx in every old-fashioned garden at the
North.
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