SUNFLOWERS by Stephen A Harris
An intriguing and fact-filled book looking at the sunflower family, its historical importance and its inspiration for artists.
Reviewer John Hoyland is a plantsman and writer.
Even the most devoted plant enthusiast would be hard put to read –let alone research and write – a whole 200odd-page book about sunflowers. Stephen A Harris’s book covers sunflowers and their relatives, known collectively as Asteraceae. The family is, I learned, the world’s largest group of flowering plants, with nine per cent of the planet’s flowering species, and occurs in almost all habitats from the Arctic to Antarctica.
Asteraceae encompasses marigolds, chrysanthemums, daisies, lettuce, thistles and dozens of other familiar plants. The book is a fascinating exploration of the family’s biology, ecology and cultural significance. The importance of thistles for the Scots, edelweiss for Austrians and chrysanthemums for the Japanese is described, with often amusing anecdotes and references, such as Mark Twain’s dismissal of edelweiss as ‘not attractive… not white’.
The totemic member of the family, the sunflower, gets a whole chapter devoted to its transformation from a minor Native American food to a global commodity providing oil, protein and vitamin E. Mathematics also gets a look in: intersecting spirals are seen in the flowerheads of many members of the family and Harris describes how in sunflowers these spirals are most frequently adjacent Fibonacci numbers. He even explains clearly and briefly what Fibonacci numbers are.
The book is part of Reaction Books’ ‘Botanical’ series and is not designed to be tackled in a continuous reading. Rather, it is made to be dipped into, and digested and enjoyed piecemeal. Open the book at any page and you will discover something new, and often surprising, about the sunflower family.