Isaac and the Sunflowers--Part 2

Roadside Kansas Sunflower

 

Having shared the information about commercially grown sunflowers and their history in last week's blog, I must admit the fact that most farmers, like Isaac, regard the common sunflower as a weed.  Although the sunflower is the state flower of Kansas, and visitors admire the golden blossoms growing along roadsides, the plants are a nuisance in corn, wheat, and soybean fields, having the potential to reduce crop yields.

 

Since its introduction to the Old World, the popularity of the sunflower has spread.  Germans make a popular bread called Sonnenblumenkernbrot (literally, sunflower whole seed bread) by combining the seeds with rye flour.  During the 18th century the popularity of sunflower oil expanded in Russia because it was one of the few oils allowed by the Russian Orthodox Church during Lent.  Using data compiled by Monfreda, C.N. Ramankutty, and J.A. Foley from 2000 production figures, the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment compiled the map below showing how far the production of sunflowers has spread across the world, far beyond its native American roots.  Indicative of its popularity and importance, the sunflower is the national flower of Ukraine.

 

The sunflower is a popular symbol.  In the late 1800s, during Isaac's lifetime, the sunflower was used as the symbol of the Aesthetic Movement.  Artists and writers of the Aesthetic style believed that art should be appreciated for itself, without any association with morality, sentimentality, or usefulness.  The purpose of art was beauty, not utility.  Perhaps the best known among its practitioners are Oscar Wilde, A.C. Swinburne, James McNeill Whistler, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  When Oscar Wilde made his American tour during Isaac's lifetime, he was often lampooned by cartoonists who drew Wilde wearing a sunflower as a boutonniere or carry a sunflower as a bouquet.

 

The flower is also a common symbol for green ideology, as well as for the Vegan Society.  It was chosen as the symbol of the Spiritualist Church because "Spiritualism turns toward the light of truth" and the sunflower turns toward the sun.  Spiritualism has its origins in the mid-1800s and while the societies and churches vary in their practices and beliefs, in general they are described as believing that when humans die it is the physical life that ends, but the personality or mind survives on a spirit plane.  Mediumship is the method through which spiritualists seek to reach these spirits.  As for their choice of the sunflower as their symbol because it follows the sun, science offers a less spiritual explanation.

Worldwide sunflower production



 

 



 

Scientists have concluded that the alignment of sunflowers is the result of heliotropism, and their movement is a circadian rhythm, synchronized by the sun.  Tests have shown that turning the sunflower 180 degrees will cause it to turn away from the sun until resynchronization by the sun over the period of a few days realigns the movement.  Whether one accepts the Spiritual or the Scientific explanation, seeing a large field of sunflowers identically aligned to face the sun is an awesome sight. 

 

One summer we had three urban, non-farming couples visiting our farm, and we hosted a supper on the lawn, inviting several of our farming neighbors.  As I worked that afternoon getting things ready for the meal, my city guests asked if I had containers they could use for wild flower bouquets for the table.  I gathered some interesting antique containers to use as vases, and they went in search of wild flowers.  That evening the tables looked lovely with the old dishes and tins holding the charmingly arranged flowers.  As the meal concluded and we lingered around the long table to visit, one of the farmers leaned back in his chair and studied the floral arrangements.  "You know, those weeds are kinda pretty," he said.

 

I cannot help but wonder if one evening after chopping sandburs and sunflowers with his hoe in the hot prairie sun all afternoon, Isaac didn't reach down and pick up a few of the slaughtered blossoms to take back to his house and put in a vase to decorate his kitchen table that evening.

Sandhill Plums

When Isaac arrived on the Kansas prairie in 1878 the land was waving grass from horizon to horizon, with little else left to accentuate the scene because of the prairie fires that swept the land so often. There were exceptions. In the spring, wild flowers, whose tubers and seeds lay waiting, burst into bloom adding splashes of color amidst the swaying grass. At the same time, thickets of sand hill plum bushes opened their delicate white blossoms, offering hope to the settlers of fresh fruit to come, for somehow, enought of the thickets survived the flames to reproduce.

Today's plains dwellers cannot appreciate what a welcome sight those blooming bushes were to the early settlers, who longed for the taste of fresh fruit. Sand hill plums are hardly bigger than cranberries, and unlike cranberries, the fruit has a central seed nearly half the size of the plum itself, leaving very little edible fruit between the seed and the outer skin. Regardless, the settlers enjoyed the beauty and slight fragrance of the blossoms and crossed their fingers that frost would not return to freeze the blossoms and deprive them of that season's tart little plums.

Isaac had a thicket on his "Timber Hill" but he had also saved seeds from some of the best plums to plant plum bushes near his house, finding that it took the seeds two or three seasons to germinate. They were also difficult to transplant because the bushes colonize from one bush with a deep root to form shallow-rooted bushes around it. These shallow-rooted bushes are unlikely to survive if transplanted, and it is difficult to tell without digging which among the bushes is the one with the deep root. Isaac explained in his Journal: "I took up some select Plum bushes on timber hill and set them in rows N. of house patch, 2 rows E. & W. Transplanting Plums generally failures by many. I determined to experiment at least, then also transplant some in the spring."

Because of the effort he had expended in both planting seeds and transplanting the deep-rooted bushes, he was annoyed when one of his neighbors raided his plums. "Lady Frack yesterday out on a plum raid through my door yard of nicest plums, vengeance mine, by calling nearest neighbors in to strip every bush." Today, with farmers having cleared fields for crops, few plum thickets remain. On Isaac's old homestead only some scraggly bushes have managed to survive in the fence row.

As a bachelor, Isaac had learned to cook for himself, but he never mentions attempting to preserve fruit. It would be nice to imagine that one of the neighbors who stripped the plum bushes to spite Mrs. Frack might have made a jar of plum jelly for Isaac, but he only describes the annual pleasure of gorging on whatever fruit was in season.

For my family, enough jars of sand hill plum jelly were canned every summer to last through the year. They were stored with the canned tomatoes, green beans, and two kinds of pickles on rows of shelves in the basement, the walls a kaleidoscope of tomato red, green beans, mossy green dills, noxiously-tinted (with green cake coloring) 3-day lime pickles, and the glow of the scarlet plum jelly. I do not continue the tradition of canning vegetables, except rare years when I can the 3-day lime pickles, but I do make plum jelly. Last year's late frost and summer drought left only a lonesome plum here and there, and we are down to the last jar of the previous year's jelly. One day, I set that jar with one that we received as a wedding favor in the window to admire the beauty of sunlight through the jelly.

Plum jelly is delicious, but it is impossible for me to separate the flavor of childhood memories from the taste of the jelly. Plum bushes have thorns, and picking the plums is a prickly business. They ripen at the hottest time of year, and filling a pail of the small plums is an exercise in endurance of heat, sweat, gnats, and often, mosquitoes. Once in the kitchen, with the jars and the lids sterilized, and the plums rinsed clean with all the stems removed, the process of cooking, mashing the last bit of juice from the pulp and skins, straining through cheese cloth to assure the jewel-like appearance, adding the sugar and a bit of lemon with Sure-gel to give you a little more insurance that the jelly will set, pouring the hot, sticky liquid jelly into the jars, sealing the lids and listening for the "pop" to know the seal is good, and finally cleaning the stickiness off the jars before putting the jelly on the shelves--all of this is the stuff of my memories, and when you add to that the memories of sitting around so many breakfast tables with loved ones it is impossible for any store-bought, expensive gourmet jelly to ever taste as good!

When we finish that last jar of jelly, we, like Isaac, will be forced to await another season's crop from the tough and prickly sand hill plum bushes with their sweet-tart little plums.