Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  ALLEN GINSBERG, ‘Sunflower Sutra’

  9. Sunflowers, drawn and engraved by Crispin de Passe the Younger, Hortus Floridus, 1614 (Courtesy of Dover Publications, Inc.)

  COMPARED WITH THE lotus or the lily, the common sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is a brute. These are the doodlings of a child’s imagination: taller than grown-ups at full height, they carry their plate-sized flowers on giant stems, a fringe of burnished yellow petals surrounding a disc of exquisitely arranged individual florets. I remember a field of sunflowers next to my sister-in-law’s house, deep in rural France. Whenever you stepped outside, you felt they were watching you. ‘Do you know what faces they have?’ asked the painter Edward Burne-Jones, ‘how they peep and peer, and look arch and winning, or bold and a little insolent sometimes?’ Some people find this creepy: ‘They got Van Gogh and now they’re after you . . . ’

  Long cultivated in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus, the sunflower burst into Europe fully formed in the first half of the sixteenth century, dazzling gardeners, courtiers, artists and collectors of botanical curiosities with its sheer size and bravura. Its celebrated ability to track the sun’s daily progress from east to west was quickly harnessed for symbolic ends, and the sunflower was given both a heathen past, as a flower reputedly sacred to the ancient civilizations of South America, and a Christianized future as the perfect symbol of Marian devotion. ‘Could there be devised a more noble Symbol of our Incomparable LADIE then this flower,’ mused the English Jesuit Henry Hawkins, ‘regarding indeed the true Sunne of Justice, whom she followed stil in the whole course of her life, unto her death?’ Secular artists and writers added a variety of other ‘meanings’, usually dependent on the flower’s uncanny ability to lock you into its stare.

  The sunflower’s emblematic power is based on a false premise, however. Green plants are phototropic and respond by growing towards the light, especially in their early stages. At sunrise, the unopened buds of cultivated young sunflowers are usually turned towards the east, and over the course of the day they follow the sun from east to west, returning overnight to an eastward orientation. As the stems mature, how ever, their tissues stiffen so that by the time the flowers appear their position is fixed, typically facing towards the east. With wild sunflowers, only the leaves exhibit some heliotropism; the flowering heads may face in any and all directions. Yet poets, painters, writers, literary and religious symbolists continue to flaunt the ‘virtues’ of this giant member of the daisy family. How did the sunflower gain such power, enabling it to confuse the evidence of our own eyes?

  THE SUNFLOWER’S STORY begins in the Americas where the plant family of Helianthus first arose some 50 million years ago, in what is now the south-western United States. For thousands of years, the common annual sunflower (H. annuus) has been flowering and setting seed in the wild as it slowly dispersed around temperate North America. Today, colonies grow wild across much of northern America, from central Mexico in the south right up to southern Canada.

  The cultivated sunflower is of much more recent origin, however. Until a decade or so ago, it was recognized as the USA’s only significant New World food crop brought into cultivation, but the archaeological evidence presented something of a puzzle. While the oldest wild sunflower achenes – the individual fruits containing a single seed – were found towards the south-west, the larger cultivated achenes were all from central and eastern North America. These included two finds given an earliest date of around 1260 BCE from sites in northern Arkansas and eastern Tennessee. The most plausible explanation for this geographical discrepancy was that wild seeds gathered by Native Americans in the south-west had then migrated with their hosts as camp-following weeds, travelling west to California, south to Texas, then northwards and eastwards across the Mississippi River, where they were eventually brought into cultivation. According to the respected American economic botanist, Charles B. Heiser Jr, this new plant could thrive only in disturbed sites around native villages; and as it had larger heads and consequently larger achenes than the wild variety, it proved an even better food plant.

  Heiser’s theory enjoyed widespread support until early this century, when the claims of central US states such as Tennessee to have nurtured the earliest domesticated sunflowers were apparently trumped by a find at Tabasco on the Gulf coast of Mexico. Carbon dating took the oldest of these achenes back to around 2110 BCE, giving Mexico the lead role in domesticating sunflowers. Now this find, too, has been challenged, and the specimen identified as most likely the seed of a bottle gourd. As Heiser now concludes, the wild sunflower may have grown in northernmost Mexico in early times, but no convincing evidence has so far emerged to prove that sunflowers were domesticated independently in Mexico; and as yet, genetic testing has revealed little Mexican ancestry in modern North American sunflower cultivars.

  The sunflower’s story abounds in such confusion. Ever since it arrived in Europe – often bearing a Peruvian tag, but ‘Peru’ in sixteenth-century Europe was geographically vague – the flower has attracted a fabulous mythological history. The plant is variously described as sacred to the Aztecs and Mayans of Meso-America and to the Incas of Peru, and its ‘discovery’ by Europeans has linked it to many of the great names of the Spanish conquest, among them Hernán Cortés, who brought the Aztecs of Mexico to their knees, and Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of the Incas of Peru. Europeans saw sunflowers in the golden-rayed sun discs of the Incas and drew parallels that were never intended by their creators. It was the story of El Dorado all over again, when the Europeans’ greed for gold fed the myth of ‘the gilded one’, always a few days’ march away into the jungle. In the words of the Trinidadian-born Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, the legend of El Dorado became like ‘the finest fiction, indistinguishable from truth’; for it was an Indian memory that the Spaniards pursued, a memory ‘confused with the legend, among jungle Indians, of the Peru the Spaniards had already conquered’.

  In truth, the sunflower appears to have played no role in Inca or Mayan mythology or ritual, and a very minor one among the Aztecs of Mexico. The archaeological evidence for the latter is scanty: three large sunflower achenes recovered from a dry cave associated with burials and ritual activities, carbon-dated to around 290 BCE; and a handful of much more recent (but still pre-conquest) wild Helianthus annuus achenes, found in an offering made at one of the principal Aztec temples, the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City.

  Other plants have played a more obvious role in Aztec ritual, notably amaranths, marigolds and maize. Amaranth grain obtained from the tassel-flowered plant Amaranthus was one of the basic food crops of the Aztec Empire, along with maize, beans and squash. On feast days honouring the Aztecs’ principal god, Huitzilopochtli, amaranth dough moistened with honey or cactus syrup was used to make ceremonial cult images of the deity. The dough became so closely linked in European minds with perceived idolatry that the conquering Spaniards forbade the cultivation of amaranth, although the edict was largely ignored and amaranth dough slipped unnoticed into Catholic ritual as locally made rosary beads.

  Marigolds and maize were similarly venerated by the Aztecs – marigolds as flowers of the dead, used even today to deck the private altars celebrating the Mexican Day of the Dead, while maize featured in many ancient superstitions. According to the early Spanish chronicler Bernardino de Sahagún, it was customary to breathe on maize before you boiled it, to overcome its fear of being cooked. The Incas in Peru went further, linking maize – the empire’s prestige crop – to Inti, the principal sun deity, through protracted celebrations of sowing, harvesting and ploughing. You will even come across reports of maize plants made of gold adorning the maize garden at Inti’s Temple of the Sun – the Coricancha at Cusco – during seed time, harvest and for the initiation of young Inca noblemen, although these, too, may evaporate on closer inspection like the gilded sunflowers of popular legend.

  Even if sunflowers are largely absent from the earliest Aztec histories and herbals, the Aztec
love of flowers is not in doubt. The rulers of ancient Mexico adored fine gardens and flowers, especially fragrant ones, and created the first botanical gardens in the Americas. Their well-developed culture of flowers has survived in the Nahuatl names used to differentiate between various sorts of gardens, whether gardens in general (‘xochitla’, ‘flower place’, or ‘xoxochitla’, ‘place of many flowers’); walled gardens (‘xochitepanyo’); pleasure gardens of the ruling class (‘xochitecpancalli’, ‘palace of flowers’); or the humble gardens of the Indians (‘xochichinancalli’, ‘flower place enclosed by a fence made of cane or reeds’).

  Indeed, Moctezuma, the last great Aztec ruler, who died in Spanish hands, gives us a vital clue to the sunflower’s role in Aztec society. According to a long-lost chronicle written in 1565 by the scholarly Dr Cervantes de Salazar, Moctezuma enjoyed his many pleasances and fine gardens crossed by paths and irrigation channels. Containing only medicinal and aromatic herbs, flowers, shrubs, and trees with fragrant blossoms, these gardens gave great pleasure to all who visited them, especially in the mornings and in the evenings. Vegetables and fruit were banished on the orders of Moctezuma himself, who believed it was not ‘kingly’ to cultivate plants for utility or profit; rather, ‘vegetable gardens and orchards were for slaves or merchants’.

  The reference to merchants takes us to another early chronicle, by the Franciscan Friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Usually known as the Florentine Codex, it contains a book devoted solely to the customs of Aztec merchants and artisans – those who worked in gold, precious stones or feathers. Here at last we find a probable sunflower in the rituals performed at a merchant’s banquet, in which seasoned warriors offered honoured guests tobacco tubes and ‘shield flowers’, ‘chimalsuchitl’, almost certainly the common sunflower, and a word still used by indigenous Nahua. Both gifts were intended symbolically: the tobacco tubes as spears and the sunflowers as shields. After the serving of food and chocolate, the sunflowers, tobacco tubes and garlands of flowers were laid as offerings before the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and at the altars of four other temples. The ritual continued in the courtyard with much whistling, singing, the beheading of a quail, incense-burning, more chocolate, magic mushrooms, the telling of visions followed by singing and dancing until dawn, when the gifts of sunflowers and tobacco tubes were buried with the incense ash in the middle of the courtyard. It must have been quite a night.

  10. The Aztec ruler Nezahualpilli (d. 1515) holding in his left hand a stylized sunflower, from the late sixteenth-century Codex Ixtlilxochitl.

  Sahagún even gives us a cartoon of the flowers and tobacco offered to Huitzilopochtli. His tasselled sunflower looks remarkably similar to the stylized flower held by the Aztec ruler of Texcoco, Nezahualpilli, in a slightly later chronicle, the Codex Ixtlilxochitl, dating from the late sixteenth century. So while the sunflower may never have played a part in sun worship, it had some ritual significance, and it is one of the flowers mentioned by the Spanish Jesuit priest José de Acosta, who travelled to the Spanish Americas in 1572 and wrote one of the earliest natural histories of the region on his return, some fifteen years later. ‘The Indians are great lovers of flowers,’ he wrote, ‘and in new Spaine more than in any other part of the worlde, & therefore they are accustomed to make many kindes of nosegaies, which there they call Suchilles, with such prety varietie and art, as nothing can be more pleasing.’ At their feasts and dances, Acosta tells us, the Indians carried flowers in their hands, and their kings and noblemen held flowers as a sign of their high status. ‘For this reason we commonly see their ancient pictures with flowers in their hands, as we see heere with gloves.’

  By the time Acosta arrived in New Spain, many of the native flowers in Indian bouquets had been replaced with Castilian imports – pinks, roses, jasmines, violets, orange flowers and the like – and it is not entirely clear whether the sunflowers and marigolds he mentions were actually bundled together with the other flowers, or whether he was merely using his train of thought to list a few native blooms: ‘It is a thing well knowne,’ he wrote, ‘that the flower which they call of the Sunne, hath the figure of the Sunne, and turnes according to the motion thereof. There are other kindes which they call gilleflowers of the Indies [marigolds], the which are like to a fine orange tawnie vellet, or a violet; those have no scent of any account, but onely are faire to the eye.’

  TO THE SPANISH and their New World territories goes the honour of introducing the sunflower to Europe, although reports that it reached Madrid as early as 1510 are unlikely to be true. Cultivated first in Spain and Italy, it moved northwards into the rest of Europe, provoking wonder at its prodigious vitality. Men marvelled at its flower like a ‘greate Platter or Dishe’; its stem thick as Hercules’ club or, more prosaically, ‘the bignesse of a strong mans arme’; its rapid germination in hot climates; and the height it achieved in a single growing season: as high as twenty-four palmi in Madrid (a massive eighteen feet or so), but only ten to eleven palmi (a more sober eight feet) in colder, damper Belgium.

  One of the first Europeans to describe the sunflower was the Spanish physician and botanist Nicolas Monardes from Seville, who never visited the Americas himself but who wrote about this ‘straunge flower’, along with other medicinal plants and herbs arriving from the New World, in a series of works from the late 1560s which were later ‘Englished’ by John Frampton, a British merchant returning from Spain. The sunflower, Monardes tells us, had already been in Spain ‘some yeres past’, and he had finally received seeds for himself. It needed support when growing, he said, or it would always be falling over, and ‘it showeth marveilous faire in Gardens’.

  Although of interest to the medical community, the sunflower seems to have arrived in Europe without any clues about its medical or other properties, and a number of botanists and gardeners bravely experimented on themselves to see what might happen. The curator of the botanical garden at Padua, Giacomo Antonio Cortuso, recommended cooking and eating the stalks and head, rather like artichokes, declaring them to be even more palatable than mushrooms or asparagus. Eating the plant was also said to produce aphrodisiac effects, a fact the Belgian botanist Rembert Dodoens coyly conveyed in Greek rather than the more accessible Latin.

  One who might have spared the Europeans much risky experimentation was the Spanish naturalist and physician to King Philip II of Spain, Francisco Hernández de Toledo, who set out for the New World in 1570 with a mission from the king to research and describe the region’s natural history. His projected stay of two years stretched to seven, mostly based around what is now Mexico City; he never reached his intended destination of Peru, and it would be eighty years before the Latin text of his manuscript was published in full.

  Accompanied by his son and a group of native artists who illustrated his specimens, Hernández travelled around the country in a litter carried by a retinue of bearers, plagued by insects and complaining about the food, the climate and the terrain. Yet Hernández identified more than three thousand plants previously unknown in Europe and became, to contemporary eyes, worryingly sympathetic to the native people, even going so far as to learn their language and translating some of his writings for them.

  Interestingly, Hernández labelled the sunflower the ‘Peruvian or large Chimalacatl’, saying that it grew in Peru and everywhere in the American provinces in plains and woods, thriving best in wooded areas and in the places where it was cultivated. He compared its seeds to those of the melon, being similar in colour, temperament and nature, although a surfeit of sunflower seeds could cause headaches, he warned. ‘However, they can help pains in the chest and even take away these pains and heartburn. Some people grind the seeds and roast them and make them into bread.’ As Cortuso had discovered in Padua, Hernández too claimed that the sunflower might ‘excite sexual appetite’, implying that he knew this only from hearsay.

  The sunflower’s supposed heliotropic properties also gave rise to some confusion. Most authorities followed Monardes in declaring that the fl
ower ‘doth tourne it selfe continually towardes the Sunne, and for this they call it of his name’. Cortuso disagreed, moving into the realm of poetry with his observation that the sunflower responded only to the rising and setting sun. ‘I maintain that it is not heliotropic but rather a worshipper of the Sun, and if I were permitted to introduce fables among records of fact, I should want to show you that this had been one of his lovers, since preserved by love and compassion in the form of this beautiful, wonderful plant.’ The more prosaic and empirical Rembert Dodoens avoided any reference to the plant’s apparent fixation on the sun, merely commenting that ‘They call it Sol Indianus, because it seems to have rays like the Sun’.

  England’s John Gerard was, unusually, the most sceptical of all. In his great Herball of 1597, much of it ‘borrowed’ from Dodoens, Gerard declared that the plant’s Latin name of ‘Flos Solis’ (Flower of the Sun) came from reports that it turned with the sun, ‘the which I coulde never observe, although I have endevored to finde out the truth of it’. Some thirty years later, the royal apothecary John Parkinson reverted to Cortuso’s view that the flower could be seen ‘bowing downe the head unto the Sunne’, but made no mention of it tracking the sun’s movements from east to west. According to Parkinson, the sunflower played no part in European medicine, although sometimes the heads were dressed and eaten ‘as Hartichokers are, and are accounted of some to be good meate, but they are too strong for my taste’.

  From Gerard, too, we get one of the best descriptions of the sunflower’s spiral arrangement of seeds, ‘set as though a cunning workeman had of purpose placed them in very good order, much like the honie combes of bees’. Here is an unwitting reference to the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, named after the Italian mathematician who discovered them early in the thirteenth century, explaining that they correspond in nature to the most efficient arrangement possible.