The Beauty and Benefits of Sunflowers

You can never mistake a sunflower for any other. It's impossible.

Such a tall golden flower impresses you immediately with an instant recognition of Summer. A field of waving sunflowers can stop you dead in your tracks.

How lovely is this flower, with such a bright golden beauty that has captured the sunshine of a hundred sunny days.

The heart that has truly loved never forgets,

But as truly loves on to the close,

As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets

The same look which she turned when he rose!

~Thomas Moore

You can make this pie in advance and freeze it for up to a month. Thaw it in the refrigerator for 20 minutes.

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 1 hour 15 minutes

Serves:4 - 6

Healthy, natural sunflower oil is light in taste and appearance and supplies more Vitamin E than any other vegetable oil.

It's a combination of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats with low saturated fat levels. .

The versatility of this healthy oil is recognised by cooks of every level. I value this golden oil for its light taste, frying performance, health benefits and, of course, the taste..

When choosing sunflower oil, try to get the unrefined oil.

A simple parable about the brevity of life

Vincent van Gogh painted these sunflowers after leaving his native Holland for the south of France with the dream of starting an artistic community. He began to paint sunflowers to decorate a bedroom for his friend Paul Gauguin.

The series of paintings was made possible by the innovations in manufactured pigments in the 19th Century.

Without the vibrancy of the new colours, such as chrome yellow, Van Gogh may never have achieved the intensity of Sunflowers.

These most famous of all sunflowers in art hold at their heart a simple parable about the brevity of life; they are at varying stages in the life cycle, from withered and wilting to vibrant full bloom.

We are accustomed to seeing the spiral in Nature.

A spiral is a curve which emanates from a central point, getting progressively farther away as it revolves around the point.

If you look closely at the centre of a sunflower you can see that the disk flowers grow in a pattern of two opposite spirals.

Big Stock Photo

Vegetable oils used to be one of those items you just HAD to buy. Now here's how to make your own.

The Sunflower Seed Huller and Oil Press By Jeff Cox -- from Organic Gardening, April 1979, Rodale Press

The name of the sunflower, Helianthus, is Greek and means, curiously enough, Sunflower

There was once a beautiful water-nymph called Clytie who fell in love with Helios, the God of the Sun. She was so much in love that she would sit on the grass and gaze up at the sun all day long but Helios, in his travels, looked over the world and never once did he see Clytie.

The other Gods took pity on her and turned her into a flower. Her legs became the sunflower's stem, her face became the flower and her golden hair the petals.

Today, in the form of a sunflower, Clytie still stares up at her love and this is why the sunflower's face always turns to follow the path of the sun.

At early dawn, like soldiers in their places,

Rank upon rank the golden sunflowers stand;

Gazing toward the east with eager faces,

Waiting, until their god shall touch the land

To life and glory, longingly they wait,

Those voiceless watchers at the morning's gate.

Dawn's portals tremble silently apart;

Far to the east, across the dewy plain,

A glory kindles that in every heart

Finds answering warmth and kindles there again;

And rapture beams in every radiant face

Now softly glowing with supernal grace.

And all day long that silent worship lasts,

And as their god moves grandly down the west,

And every stem a lengthening shadow casts

Toward the east, ah, they love him best,

And watch till every lingering ray is gone,

Then slowly turn to greet another dawn.

~Albert Bigelow Paine~