Country & Garden: Nature Note

Country Matters

SUNFLOWERS ARE still ripening in many gardens and a few fields. The name helianthus comes direct from Greek - helios (sun) and anthos (flower) - and the plants are heliotropic: that is, as the day goes on, they turn so that the blooms keep facing the sun.

Hybrid varieties, developed during the Sixties, do well in our northern climate, but such are the difficulties of harvesting that only about 300 acres of sunflowers are grown commercially in the whole of Britain. The heads have to be absolutely dry, so that the seeds will shake out of them in the combine, and if damp weather persists there is a risk that the flowers will start to rot. Because the seeds contain so much oil (about 40 per cent of the content by weight) they have been known to catch fire in conventional grain-dryers.

A good crop will produce a ton of seed per acre, worth more than pounds 200 if it is good enough for birdseed, about pounds 160 if used for crushing. Almost the entire UK output goes for birdseed; elsewhere most seed is processed to make cooking oil and cattle cake.

On the domestic front, sunflowers became fashionable about five years ago, when Japanese breeders began to produce bushier plants with smaller blooms. Now florists treat them as an indoor variety - with the warning that, like chrysanthemums, to which they are related, they need vast quantities of water.

Duff Hart-Davis