Friday, August 2, 2013

MORE SUNFLOWER TALES        
Although many people would not know from where the sunflower originated it is not really a mistake for which they could be blamed. It would not take long for Europeans, after the discovery of the New World as they called it, to see the benefits of transporting seeds across the Atlantic and beyond. It is thought that the plant arrived in the Old World (to Spain) around the beginning of the sixteenth century but because of its wonderful size and beauty (it was considered very exotic) the sunflower was first used mostly as an ornamental plant. There is a record of a patent for squeezing the oil out of the sunflower much later – in England in 1716.

  It was  not until the eighteenth century that the sunflower gained huge popularity as a cultivated plant and the person we have to thank for that is perhaps not the first who might spring to mind. Peter the Great of Russia went on one of his many trips    and landed up in Holland. There, he became so enamored of the giant flower that he took seeds back to Russia where the people were no doubt nonplussed by it – at least to begin with. During Lent, the Russian Orthodox Church forbad its adherents from consuming oil. However, the oil of the sunflower was not on the prohibited list and the Russian people jumped on Peter’s bandwagon wholeheartedly. By the third decade of the nineteenth century sunflower oil was manufactured in Russia on a large and highly
lucrative commercial scale.
Russia was awash with the giant flowers, growing over two million acres a year. They identified two types, one for oil production and one for their own consumption. The government even invested money in to what we now call research projects and one scientist, VS Pustovoit was the originator of the most successful breeding project. Even today scientific awards for the study of the sunflower are awarded in his name. So, by 1830 the time was ripe for the sunflower (as it had become in Russia) to make a triumphant return to the Americas.


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