THE REALLY USEFUL SHOW

Sunflowers have been cultivated for over 5 000 years and have been used as staple food by indigenous North Americans since time immemorial; they ground up the seeds to make meal for all kinds of nourishing cakes and porridges, and cooked the flowerbuds as vegetables, rather like artichokes.

They also used the petals and seeds to produce yellow, red and purple dyes, wove the fibres into baskets and used the plants’ healing properties to treat wounds and a wide range of afflictions.

Seeds arrived in Europe in 1510 and the Russians were the first northerners to begin planting for oil. Centuries later Josef Stalin set up a research programme to improve the plant, which boosted oil yields by 50%. Today sunflower oil is among the four most popular in the world.

The stems are one of the lightest of all naturally occurring substances and were once used as the key flotation material in life jackets. And there’s more: sunflowers are able to absorb radioactive ions and heavy metals in soil. They’ve been planted on a massive scale at both Chernobyl and Fukushima to help cleanse contaminated soil and are also being used around old factories and on toxic urban wasteland.