On a hot, dry summer days, it is common to find tall sunflowers brightening a perfectly arid roadside, as if they seem to have found all their vital requirements right there. This year, a family of those same sunflowers, Helianthus annuus, the common sunflower, have found their way to the Granada Native Garden. We didn’t plant them, but they somehow found a happy spot along Murrieta Blvd. at the base of a berm of soil trucked-in during the establishment of the GNG back in 2003.

Altho Helianthus annuus is a California native, it has undergone some interesting changes over the years. The Native Americans recognized the value of this plant for its value as a food as well as its medical applications. During the last 3,000 years, they domesticated the crop, gradually changing its genetic composition by repeatedly selecting the largest seeds and planting them, thus increasing the seed size by approximately 1,000 percent! So genetic engineering is not so new a concept.

Today the raw seeds are a popular snack, especially on sports fields and in granolas and salads. But the Native Americans also ate them roasted, cooked, dried, ground, mixed with other seeds in a pinole (a porridge high in vitamins, nutrients and fiber), and as a source of oil. The roasted seeds have even been used as a coffee substitute. The flowers yielded purple, black and yellow dyes used to color basketry materials and to decorate their bodies. The seeds and other parts of the foliage nourish numerous species of birds, rodents and mammals.

The plant also had extensive medicinal applications which different indigenous tribes took advantage of: as a treatment for kidney, lung and skin ailments, snakebite, fevers, to stimulate the appetite or alleviate fatigue while on a hunt, to remove warts, alleviate rheumatism, and reportedly “as a disinfectant to prevent prenatal infections caused by a solar eclipse”.

Quotes for the Day
The result of landscape degradation and species reductions or extinctions but over the long term, valuable lessons were learned about how to steward nature for future generations.
– M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild, 1908, p.6

Altho extinction is a natural process, modern humans have driven the rate of extinctions today about one hundred times the natural rate.
– M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild, 1908, p.7