BY THE TIME Gerard and Parkinson were writing about sunflowers, the plant’s fame had been fanned by eyewitness accounts from North America of sunflowers growing wild and in native encampments. Twenty years before the permanent settlement of Virginia by Europeans in 1607, the Englishman Thomas Hariot had visited villages and palisaded towns in what is now North Carolina, where he described having seen a great herb in the form of a marigold, about six feet in height and its flower head a span in breadth. ‘Of the seedes heereof they make both a kinde of bread and broth,’ he noted.
According to Hariot, the Indians used neither muck nor dung for their crops, nor did they plough or dig, but simply broke up the top soil with their mattocks and hoes (or short ‘peckers’ in the case of women), planting their crops of maize, peas, beans, squash, pumpkins and gourds, herbs and sunflowers, either separately or mixed together in the same ground. The Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry used these details to add garden plots and a stand of giant sunflowers to the much sparser depiction of an Algonquian village painted originally by John White, governor of Sir Walter Raleigh’s failed colony of Roanoke. De Bry’s sunflowers have heads that are very much larger than those of the Native Americans seen wandering about the village, or engaged in a ceremonial dance around a circle of carved wooden posts.
Thirty-five years after Hariot and White recorded sunflower crops in North Carolina, the Frenchman Samuel de Champlain sent back similar reports from New France across the border into what is now Canada. Here among Ontario’s many lakes and waterways he found the land cleared of trees. ‘The soil is good and the savages grow a great deal of Indian corn, which does extremely well for them, as do squash and sunflowers. Sunflowers they grow for their seeds, from which they extract an oil used in anointing the head.’
By 1640, the sunflower was so associated with the Americas, North and South, that John Parkinson used it on the title page of his herbal, Theatrum Botanicum: The Theater of Plantes, as one of the continent’s defining plants. In a hotchpotch of habitats and traditions, a bare-breasted and allegorical female America rides a droopy-eared goat (or is it a llama?) through a desert landscape dotted with spiny cacti, a passion flower and a giant sunflower. The other continents are similarly exotic. A turbaned lady Asia sits atop a rhinoceros, while Africa rides a prick-eared zebra.
In North America particularly, as travellers and pioneers pushed ever westwards, reports continued to surface of sunflowers grown and harvested by the indigenous populations, and their many uses in food and medicine. Even today, the common sunflower finds many uses among Native Americans: for its analgesic, anti-rheumatic and disinfectant properties; as a pulmonary, dermatological and gynaecological aid; as a snakebite remedy among the White Mountain Apaches and the Zuni of New Mexico; and as a stimulant and dietary aid. Several native peoples, among them the Gros Ventre and the Ree of Montana, and the Mandan of North Dakota, report its use in ceremonial medicine, using oil from the seeds to lubricate or paint the face or body. The Navajo of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah include it as one of the ingredients in the liniment for their war dance, along with double bladderpod, sumac and mistletoe, while the Kayenta Navajo of north-eastern Arizona use it in their sun sand-painting ceremony.
In Europe, by contrast, it was the sunflower’s beauty and strangeness that caught public attention, rather than its utility. From the early seventeenth century, the plant’s resplendent flower head dominated the florilegia that became so popular across Europe, combining an aristocratic love of exotic plants with an emerging interest in botanical science. For sheer size and decorative detail, the most remarkable was the Hortus Eystettensis by Basilius Besler, a Nuremberg apothecary who recorded the plants in the Bavarian garden of his patron, the Prince-Bishop of Eichstätt. Published in 1613, the Hortus Eystettensis was described by a near-contemporary as the ‘massiest’ of herbals, its two enormous volumes requiring a wheelbarrow to cart them about.
Besler’s engraved sunflower – he called it Flos Solis major & Helianthemum – is one of the most striking images in the entire work, and fully bears out the scope of his grandiose ambitions. Included with the plants of summer – an arrangement that reflected the weekly despatch of flowers from Eichstätt to Nuremberg during their flowering seasons – the sunflower’s massive head occupies most of one page, its outer ray of cross-hatched petals curling at the tips like a fringed collar. The individual florets of the head swirl round from the centre in various stages of opening. The artist and his engravers must have driven themselves mad in their efforts to capture the intricacy of the florets’ arrangement, which they actually achieve more accurately in the drawing of a smaller sunflower, called by Besler Flos Solis proliferi.
Other painted or drawn sunflowers seem necessarily more subdued. Despite their muscular stems, the two sunflower heads in the Hortus Floridus (1614–17) by Crispin de Passe the Younger look almost dainty in comparison, squeezed into an oblong quarto volume that fits neatly into the hand. But in the Hortus Floridus’s frontispiece to the flowers of autumn, another more menacing sunflower lurks in the shadows behind the dreamy-eyed goddess Flora, who clutches a cornucopia of tulips, roses, lilies and other more traditional garden flowers. The sunflower and pet greyhound painted mid-century by the English amateur Alexander Marshal is a strange confection of curling leaves and outer petals surrounding a relatively small, black-seeded head, while the large sunflower head and leaf painted early in the eighteenth century for Mary, the first Duchess of Beaufort, looks completely artificial, like a child’s toy flower made out of felt.
GIVEN THE FLOWER’S striking physical presence, it was only natural that the moralists would soon subvert the sunflower to their own ends. Most emblematic uses of the sunflower hinge on its supposed heliotropism, which, to European minds, supplanted that of the more modest heliotrope (Heliotropium), a member of the borage family. While many of the species in this genus are native to the Americas, the European heliotrope (Heliotropium europaeum) has small white flowers with five petals, much like those of perennial geraniums.
In Europe, the observation that plants turn towards the sun goes back to the ancient Greeks and the writings of Theophrastus, further amplified in the first century by the Greek-born Dioscorides and the Roman historian Pliny the Elder. Identifying the actual plants is problematic, however, as ‘heliotrope’ was not the name of one particular species; rather, it designated a solar plant that reacted mechanically to the sun’s movement, either by turning its leaves or flowers or by opening and closing its flowers with the sun.
Of all the ancient writers on plants with heliotropic tendencies, Ovid exerted the most enduring influence in his retelling of the disastrous and unrequited love of the sad nymph Clytie for the sun god, Apollo. Upon discovering that Apollo loved her sister Leucothoe, Clytie betrayed her sister to their father after the girl had succumbed to Apollo in a blaze of glory. The sisters shared an oddly similar fate. Buried alive by her father – the traditional punishment meted out to an unchaste vestal virgin – Leucothoe was anointed with Apollo’s fragrant nectar and turned into a frankincense tree, while Clytie languished unto death,
and where her face had been
A flower like a violet was seen.
Though rooted fast, towards the sun she turns;
Her shape is changed, but still her passion burns.
Once the sunflower had taken root in European consciousness, it ousted rivals for Clytie’s heliotropic flower, even if Ovid had never set eyes on it. Still others would turn Clytie into the equally brash marigold, whose strident yellow made a mockery of Ovid’s intended draining of life and vitality from the lovelorn nymph.
In matters of the heart, too, the sunflower was quickly amassing a variety of meanings: of ardent love – in the Amorum Emblemata of Rubens’ teacher, Otto van Veen, for instance; and of marital fidelity – in Bartholomeus van der Helst’s Young Woman with a Sunflower, or Ferdinand Bol’s portrait of an unknown couple, painted in 1654. A girl depicted on her own with a sunflower was either th
inking faithfully of her absent lover, or advertising her potential as a faithful wife.
The sunflower as an emblem of secular love was soon absorbed into Christian – and specifically Marian – iconography. Forget the sunflower’s idolatrous past; here was a flower whose devotion to the sun was equal to that of the Virgin Mary towards her son, that ‘loftie Cedar of flowers, wherin the Sun, could he nestle himself, would choose of al the rest to build his neast’. The sunflower’s devotional character shines through in illustrations to the Jesuit Henry Hawkins’s Marian meditations, Partheneia Sacra. In the chapter devoted to this ‘miracle of flowers’, the sunflower appears garlanded with other flowers sacred to the Virgin – stylized roses, violets, lilies, carnations, passion flowers and the like; in another, the flower lifts its head gaily to the sun, and droops under the moon. Hawkins turned even the flower’s lack of smell to a moral advantage, suggesting that any fragrance, if added to its beauty and admirable singularities, would have made men ‘stark mad indeed, with doting upon it’.
Devotion was also the theme of Anthony Van Dyck’s multi-layered Self-Portrait with Sunflower painted in the same year, 1633, in which the artist, looking over his right shoulder, engages the viewer in a quizzical gaze. One hand plays with a gold chain given to him by his patron, King Charles I of England, while the other points to a giant sunflower set against billowing clouds. We see the sunflower not full face as the florilegia typically portray, but angled towards the artist. As a statement about art and patronage it is wonderfully complex, for Van Dyck’s ‘devotion’ was of several kinds: of the artist for his patron and for his religion, most obviously, and for the rising power of nature as a suitable subject for art. Van Dyck would later paint his friend and kindred spirit, the virtuoso and natural philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby, with just such a sunflower.
But as the seventeenth century progressed, moralizing emblem books fell victim to their own popularity and slipped into sentimental cliché. Sunflowers naturally abounded, generally as signifiers of fidelity and yearning of a moral or secular kind. Daniel de la Feuille’s Devises et Emblemes, published in Amsterdam in 1691, retained some sharpness in its sunflower images, helpfully translating its mottos into Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, English, Flemish and German. Yet the same images and thoughts were liberally ‘borrowed’ again and again over decades, cropping up, for instance, in Emblems for the Entertainment and Improvement of Youth of 1750 and its many subsequent editions, but having lost much of their definition.
One original artist who took a fresh look at the sunflower and subsumed it into his personal iconography was the English visionary poet, painter and printmaker William Blake. For Blake, the sunflower’s supposed heliotropism hinted at woman’s repressed and repressive sexuality, which to his mind operated largely by denying bodily pleasures to both sexes. Blake’s fleeting two-stanza poem ‘Ah! Sun-flower’ appears in Songs of Experience sandwiched between ‘My Pretty Rose Tree’ and ‘The Lilly’. These are clearly not the romantic outpourings of an uncritical flower lover. While the white lily does at least ‘in Love delight’, the sunflower poem drags its metric feet as if to emphasize the dangers of frustrated desire, and the subjects’ inability to live in and for the moment.
Ah! Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done:
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
Some thirty years later, Blake returned to the sunflower image in his illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, commissioned by the patron of his last years, the English landscape painter John Linnell. As always, Blake reinterpreted Dante’s ideas, most spectacularly substituting a giant sunflower for Dante’s pure white rose of Paradise, vast in size and fragrant through all eternity. In Blake’s revisioning, by contrast, the Virgin Mary sits enthroned in a sunflower as Queen of the Fallen World, naked except for a gauzy cloak and holding a lily sceptre and a looking glass, both sexual symbols for Blake but also attributes of rampant materialism. Once again, Blake uses the sunflower to warn against the female, who by her will exerts dominion over her mate in the only way she can – by denying him sex, yet forbidding him to seek satisfaction elsewhere. Henry Hawkins would have been sorely distressed to see one of his favourite devotional flowers fallen so low.
ALTHOUGH IT IS unlikely that Blake’s radically recast sunflowers had much impact on public perceptions, reactions to garden sunflowers followed a similar trajectory to the flower’s symbolic currency, progressing from the initial wonder expressed by early botanical writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through the increasing familiarity of the Georgians with all the new sunflower varieties, to eventual disdain.
Philip Miller, gardener to the Society of Apothecaries at Chelsea, expressed surprise in the first edition of his monumentally successful Georgian guide to horticulture, The Gardeners Dictionary, that the sunflower had been a stranger to European gardens before the discovery of America. He listed seven different sorts of annual sunflowers, distinguished by type (whether single or double), flower colour (including various shades of brimstone) and seed colour (black, white and one with ash-coloured stripes). Although perennial varieties rarely set seed in England, Miller particularly recommended the ‘Common Perennial or Everlasting Sun-Flower’, which in his view produced ‘the largest and most valuable Flower, and is a very proper Furniture for large Borders in great Gardens, as also for Bosquets of large growing Plants, or to intermix in small Quarters with Shrubs, or in Walks under Trees where few other Plants will thrive’. Along with Thomas Fairchild, the Hoxton nurseryman and author of The City Gardener, Miller recommended the perennial sunflower for city gardens, commenting that it ‘doth grow in Defiance of the Smoak better than most other Plants’. Like another contemporary nurseryman, Robert Furber, he commended its use as a cut flower ‘for Basons, &c. to adorn Halls and Chimnies in a Season when we are at a Loss for other Flowers. It begins flowering in June,’ he added, ‘and continues until October.’
But tastes change in garden plants as in everything else, and as more exotics reached the gardens of Europe and elsewhere – and as gardens shrank in size – the over-large, overblown sunflower began to fall out of favour. John Claudius Loudon included the briefest of entries in the index to his mammoth An Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1,469 pages in the first edition of 1822), remarking that it was ‘of easy culture’ and perhaps therefore not worth discussing in the text itself. Its simple habits appealed to Loudon’s wife Jane, who pointed out in her classic Gardening for Ladies that the annual plant was suitable only where there was ‘abundance of room, on account of the large size of its stalks and leaves’. Perennial kinds were much smaller, however, and very ornamental.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the sunflower needed apologists of the stature of the great Irish gardener, William Robinson, to defend its continued inclusion in better-class gardens. While admitting that all the perennial varieties were vigorous growers and that ‘not a few’ of the genus were ‘coarse and weedy, unfitted for the flower-garden’, Robinson believed that a fair number, including some not yet in general cultivation, could make their mark in even ‘the best-kept flower-garden’. Although often dismissed as a cottager’s flower, the annual sunflower was ‘one of the noblest plants we have, and one of the most effective for various positions’, he declared. As an advocate of wilder styles of gardening, Robinson advised planting it among tall shrubs in a sheltered part of the garden; here it would assume ‘a dense branching tree-like habit’ without the need for staking, and produce giant flowers over a foot in diameter.
AS THE SUNFLOWER’S fortunes began to wane in the garden, so it played only an incidental role in the elaborate ‘language of flowers’ first codified in Napoleonic France, which sparked similar vogue
s in Britain and America. Aimed largely at women in polite society, this ‘language’ assigned meanings to flowers and devised a whole grammar to decipher how bouquets should be interpreted in the conduct of a love affair. Part game, part primer aimed at moral improvement, it was never intended to be taken too literally. Indeed, as authors from different cultures ascribed contradictory meanings to the same few flowers, any resultant dialogue would soon have given rise to serious misunderstandings.
The various meanings attached to the sunflower reflect how far it had fallen in public esteem. Although the author of one of the earliest and most literal French flower books, B. Delachénaye’s Abécédaire de Flore, ou Langage des Fleurs, included a fine heliotropic sunflower in his bouquet, translated in the accompanying text to mean ‘My eyes see only you’, most authors referred to the flower’s blatant showiness. ‘Pride’, ‘haughtiness’ and ‘false riches’ are not the sort of compliments a woman would welcome in a nosegay from a lover or potential suitor. The English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray judged the common sunflower to be similarly vulgar, commenting thus on the modest appeal of the simple, good-natured Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair:
there are sweet modest little souls on which you light, fragrant and blooming tenderly in quiet shady places; and there are garden-ornaments, as big as brass warming-pans, that are fit to stare the sun itself out of countenance. Miss Sedley was not of the sunflower sort; and I say it is out of the rules of all proportion to draw a violet the size of a double dahlia.
By the time Thackeray published his satire on nineteenth-century Britain, the language of flowers was itself falling prey to the satirists. In France, where the fashion had first arisen, the caricaturist J. J. Grandville joined forces with the republican writer and editor Taxile Delord to produce a savage parody, Les Fleurs Animées, in which the flowers talked back. Grandville’s sunflower is a distinctly unpleasant caricature of a kneeling flower with a blacked-up native face, dressed in a petal skirt and wing-like cloak of leaves. Delord takes the sunflower back to its supposed Mexican roots and mythological – if fanciful – sun worship. Set in Mexico City in the middle of the previous century, the story concerns the trumped-up condemnation by the Inquisition of a local headman and direct descendant of Moctezuma, Tumilco, who is accused of sun worship and sacrificing Christians. (In reality, it was the Inquisition that craved a good sacrificial burning.) After his life is spared on the intervention of a young dancer, Tumilco becomes a token Christian, living modestly until his final illness when he unexpectedly rejects the priest sent by his charitable neighbours and asks instead for the window to be opened. ‘There is my God,’ he cries, ‘and the God of my fathers. Oh Sun, receive your child in your breast.’ Tumilco dies and the story’s satirical moral is made absolutely clear: you can sooner stop a sunflower tracking the sun than prevent heretics from returning to the cult of their ancestors.
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