The cycle for yellow sunflowers is over. Their smiley faces have naturally morphed into heavy heads that look like big pancakes.
There's a whole lot more to the sunflower, though, than its pretty face. From stem to petal to seed, it is medicinal...spiritual...serviceable...nutritional...valuable...and even magical.
- The Native Americans extracted yellow dye from the sunflower petals and oils that made their ceremonial body paints.
- The Aztecs of ancient Peru worshiped the sunflower. They believed it was a celestial being. Sunflower images made of gold were placed in their temples, and they crowned their princesses with the yellow flowers.
- The most distinguishing feature of the sunflower is the way its flowering head magically tracks the movement of the sun. For this reason, the sunflower is the symbol of the Spiritualist Church that believes spiritual thought can take a person from darkness to light.
- After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that happened in the Ukraine in 1986, sunflowers were used to remove harmful nuclear debris from the water. When most of the water in the region was contaminated, planting sunflowers on a floating raft reduced the impact of radiation in the waters up to 95%. A similar kind of operation was used in 2011 in Japan after that nuclear disaster.
- A new kind of low-pollen sunflower has been created, which helps reduce the risk of asthma for people who are allergic to pollen grains.
- Parts of the sunflower plant is able to relieve chronic asthma and whooping cough due to bronchitis, and is effective in healing wounds and infections.
- Sunflower oil is believed to be beneficial in the fight against heart disease and neurological disorders.
THIS POST IS BEING INTERRUPTED WITH BREAKING NEWS: A bit ago hubby went outside to fill the bird feeders. Ordinarily this morning routine does not involve profanity. Information has it that sufficient evidence exists to prosecute the bushy-tailed prankster that assaulted our bird plaza and selfishly helped himself to the sunflower pancake. Things are tense.
The part that scares me is hubby's sudden hunger for squirrel soup.