“Go big red!”

Right! We’re in Nebraska. But as a naturalist I would have to say for Nebraska we should say “Go Big Yellow!”

We don’t have a lot of natural reds this time of year, but the color yellow is everywhere. Two sources of yellow are goldenrod and sunflowers.

The goldenrod was chosen as the “State Flower” in 1895 via a statewide vote of school children! Goldenrod, the sunflower, and the violet were the three most popular choices. It was left to the Legislature to decide the winner. Across the State different editors of papers put in their 2-cents worth on which plant should be chosen. The Fremont paper even argued for the Russian thistle, also called the “tumbleweed” because it was everywhere and very hardy. Others said the “State Flower” should be a native and not an introduced species. That left the sunflower, the violet, and the goldenrod.

It was pointed out that in 1894 Kansas designated the sunflower as their “State Flower”. Not wanting to copy Kansas, that left only the violet and goldenrod.

Goldenrod won out, in part because of the campaign by newspaper editors for it to be chosen. The following is from a two column editorial in the “Wealth Makers of the World”, a publication out of Lincoln in 1895, as to why the goldenrod should be the state flower: “Its color is the most beautiful in nature: the color of the sunshine; the color of King Corn; the color of gold, the most precious of metals.”

Some consider the goldenrod a weed, and it does act like one; however, it is actually a valuable plant that, like soybeans and other legumes, fixes nitrogen in the soil, which in turn is utilized by other plants.

Still, I think I would have preferred the sunflower.

There are nine different species of sunflowers native to Nebraska. Some, like the plains sunflower, are annuals and others like the Maximilian sunflower are perennials.

The flower of the sunflower is not a single flower but a cluster of smaller ones. Plants that have these kinds of flower clusters are called composite flowers.

The yellow ring of petals surrounds the multiple flowers, and each flower produces a single seed.

Sunflowers are also disturbance plants in that the seed will germinate if not shaded by grass or other plants. Many people see the disturbed area and the resulting sunflowers and think that somehow the sunflowers are at fault. They are not. They are just opportunistic. If the grass fills in the area next spring the light won’t get to the seeds and the sunflower won’t germinate.

Sunflowers produce a huge number of seeds and that is good because the seeds are a great source of food for birds, small mammals and baseball players.

Sunflower seeds are also utilized for oil. Wild sunflowers are not harvested to provide seeds for the birds, oil and baseball players, instead we grow commercial sunflowers. In Nebraska over 100,000 acres are dedicated to sunflowers with 3 million acres utilized across the country producing almost 1.5 billion tons of sunflower seeds. Most are used for the production of sunflower oil. Approximately 240 million pounds are reserved for the birds and the guys in the dugout.