Helianthus annuus is also called sunflower. Compositae, sunflower. 1 panicum miliaceum,1~ 3m high. The stems are erect, stout, round, angular and covered with white coarse bristles. Leaves are usually alternate, heart-shaped, ovate or ovoid, with acute or acuminate apex, 3 veins at the base, coarsely serrated edges, rough sides and long hairy stalks. Head inflorescence, extremely large, 10 ~ 30 cm in diameter, solitary at the top of stem or branch, often inclined downward. The involucral bracts are multi-layered, leafy, imbricate, hairy, flowering in summer, with yellow tongue-shaped flowers at the edge of inflorescence, which is fruitless. The middle of the inflorescence is a bisexual tubular flower, brown or purple, solid. Achene, obovate or ovoid oblong, slightly flat, with lignified skin, gray or black, commonly known as sunflower seeds. Sex is warm and drought-tolerant. Native to North America, it is cultivated all over the world. Seeds are extremely high in oil content and delicious, and can be fried or pressed for oil. They are important oil crops. There are three types: edible type, oil type and dual-purpose type. Receptacle, stem and shell can be used as industrial raw materials.

There is a sad legend about sunflowers. Clear is the fairy of Shui Ze. One day, she met Apollo, the sun god who was hunting in the forest. She was deeply attracted by this handsome God and fell madly in love with him. However, Apollo left without looking at her. Clarity longed for Apollo to talk to her one day, but she never saw him again. So she can only look up at the sky every day and watch Apollo drive across the sky in a gorgeous Japanese car. She stared at Apollo's journey until he went down the mountain. Every day, every day, she just sat there, her hair disheveled and her face gaunt. As soon as the sun rises, she looks at it. Later, the gods took pity on her and turned her into a golden sunflower. Her face turned into a disk, always facing the sun, following him every day and telling him her eternal love.

It is sweet and non-toxic.

Component seeds contain fatty oil, and the main components in the oil are oleic glyceride, linseed oleic glyceride and a small amount of palmitic acid and stearic acid. The ash of the stem contains a lot of potassium carbonate.

Function: calming the liver and expelling wind, clearing damp-heat and eliminating qi stagnation. Seed oil can be used as the basic medicine of ointment. Stem pith is a diuretic and anti-inflammatory agent. Leaves and petals can be used as bitter stomachic drugs. Fruit bowl (receptacle) has the function of lowering blood pressure.

[dizzy]

30~60 grams of fresh fruit plate, decocted in water, twice a day.

[Female menstrual abdominal pain]

Sunflower seed dish (dry product) 30 ~ 60g, decocted in water, with appropriate amount of brown sugar, twice a day.

[Urinary stranguria (including urinary tract infection and urinary calculi, etc.). ), female leucorrhea]

White pulp sunflower stalk 15 ~ 30g, decocted in water for 2~3 times (not too much), twice a day.

[asthma]

30~60 grams of flower disk, decocted in water.

[whooping cough, chronic bronchitis, cough and asthma]

30 ~ 60g of white pulp sunflower stalks are decocted in water to remove residues, and white sugar is added, and taken 2 ~ 3 times a day.

[Stomach pain, hernia]

60 grams of sunflower plate, fried in water.

[gangrene of back, multiple pus heads, mastitis]

Sunflowers can be burned, ground and coated with sesame oil. In addition, it costs 60 grams and is decocted with wine.

[Foot tendon (gastrocnemius spasm)]

30 grams of fresh sunflower stalks and white pulp, 30 grams of lycopodium clavatum, boiled pig's trotters to eat.

Scientific name sunflower

composite family

Alias sunflower

North America of origin

Morphological characteristics Sunflowers can be used all year round, mainly in summer and winter. The flowering period can last for more than two weeks. Sunflowers are shaped like the sun, with bright and generous flowers, which are suitable for ornamental decoration. Her seeds have more economic value, not only can be made into popular sunflower seeds, but also can extract high-grade edible sunflower oil with low cholesterol. Sunflower varieties can be divided into "general ornamental" varieties or "edible" varieties. General ornamental varieties are characterized by short plants, generally less than half a meter, which are suitable for pot planting. Edible varieties are tall and can grow to more than 2 meters in the soil of general open-air nurseries. Sunflowers grow quite rapidly, and generally bloom about two months after planting. Their flower patterns can be divided into single petals, double petals or single flowers with multiple flowers, and the flowering period can last for more than two weeks.

The key point of propagation and cultivation is to reproduce offspring with seeds, and peat soil is suitable for sowing. Sunflower has a high demand for light and a wide range of temperature tolerance, which is suitable for 15-30 degrees Celsius, but it still grows rapidly in summer. Because of the high light requirement, fast metabolism and large water demand, it is advisable to irrigate and water frequently to keep the soil moist and water it every day in summer. The best way is to mix organic fertilizer into the culture soil; In addition, chemical fertilizer can also be added according to plant conditions.

Van Gogh's art was great, but it was not recognized by the society before his death. His works contain profound tragic consciousness, and his strong personality and unique pursuit in form are far ahead of his generation, which is really difficult to be accepted by people at that time. He used the environment to grasp the object, and he changed the reality again to achieve the real truth, which contributed to the birth of expressionism. When people misunderstand him the most, it is when he has the most confidence in his own creation. That's why he left a permanent work of art. He directly influenced animalism in France, expressionism in Germany, and even lyrical abstract portraits that appeared in the early 20th century. Sunflowers are produced in sunny southern France. The painter is like a burning flame, full of fiery passion, which makes the brushwork with full sense of movement and seemingly continuous rotation seem so thick and powerful, and the color contrast is simple and strong. However, in this thick and simple, it is full of wisdom and aura. When watching this painting, the viewers all felt the exciting picture effect, their hearts trembled, and they were all eager to try generate, and * * * was integrated into Van Gogh's rich subjective feelings. In a word, the sunflower in Van Gogh's works is not just a plant, but a life with primitive impulse and enthusiasm.

Is the sunflower heading for the sun?

Fang zhouzi

Liu, a law professor, recently sent me several articles, some legal articles and some papers. Among them, there is a group of articles he wrote in 1998, "Statement and Dialogue on Sunflowers", to the effect that after his own special observation, he found that sunflowers do not rotate with the sun as most people think; Logically speaking, sunflowers can't rotate. "How can something so thick and hard rotate at will?" ; All the reference books only talk about how to turn the sunflower instead of how to turn it. It can be seen that the editors are "cash-strapped" and "empty-bellied" on this issue and can't speak at all. But all the reference books and textbooks say that sunflowers face the sun, deceiving 6 billion people all over the world. He wrote an article "How does a sunflower face the sun?"? The article exposed this big scam, voted in several newspapers, but it was not accepted, so it had to be published online, which did not cause repercussions. He felt very sad. "In order to fight ignorance, deception and absurdity," he wants to publish it again on the Internet, calling on "Sunflowers only go east, not to the sun. "Primary and secondary school teachers, writers, popular science writers and reference book editors, please be careful and stop fooling all mankind."

In fact, as long as people who have observed sunflowers, they will inevitably have the same confusion, although they may not be as angry as Liu Jiaoshou.

Anger. For example, the writer Zhang Kangkang wrote an essay "Sunflower". She found a big sunflower with its back facing the sun at the foot of Tianshan Mountain. When the sun went down, she "remained unmoved, motionless, and stubbornly nodded to the east, only turning the green tray to the west-slanting sun." I couldn't help asking a series of questions: "Is the well-known Xiangyang flower a big lie?" "Is it the sunflower that doesn't revolve around the sun at all in the world, or is it the sunflower at the foot of Tianshan Mountain that suddenly changed its genetics and became an exception to rebellion?" "They must be some special varieties introduced from other places. After being nourished by the snow in Tianshan Mountain, they have become different in the sunflower population?" ..... When I was in kindergarten, I planted a sunflower on my balcony, and I wondered why it didn't move. There was no "sunflower blooming in the sun" like Ersang. However, I don't have so many problems, only to blame for not planting sunflowers well.

Sunflower originated in North America and was brought back to Europe by Spanish colonists in 15 10, and was introduced to China by missionaries in Wanli. Western naturalists noticed sunflowers, and scholars in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties also mentioned their sunflowers in particular. 1688 released the reading glasses in more detail: "Sunflower, a sunflower in Xifan. One or two feet tall, with leaves larger than hollyhocks, narrow tips and many notches. Flowers bloom in June, and there is only one flower on the top of each pole. The yellow flower has a big heart. It is shaped like a plate. As the sun rotates, if the sun rises, the flowers face east, the flowers go straight up at noon, and the flowers face west when the sun goes down. " China's original sunflower refers to sunflower, which is also Japanese. Poets in the Tang and Song Dynasties have repeatedly recited, such as Du Fu's poem: "Sunflowers depend on the sun, but their physical properties are hard to take away." Mei's poem "Sunflower" said: "This heart was not born with the rising sun, but it is willing to believe that many grasses can drown it." Liu Kezhuang's poem "Kwai" said: "The ancient walls are shaded, and the garden is overgrown with weeds and trees. Have you ever been exposed to rain and dew and never changed your heart? " It can be seen that "sunflower" has been closely linked with "Xiangyang" since ancient times. I suspect that the name of sunflower was changed from "Zhang Ju" and "Xifanju" when it was first introduced to China to "Sunflower" and "Xifankui", which is related to its Japanese orientation, so that the word "sunflower" now refers to sunflower exclusively, and even some commentators mistakenly think that the sunflower mentioned by poets in the Tang and Song Dynasties also refers to sunflower.

So is the sunflower heading for the sun? Is this really a big scam that fooled almost everyone? The answer is: it depends on what stage of growth. It is inaccurate to say that sunflower "always faces the sun" is a reference book, which is the cause of misunderstanding by countless people, Zhang Kangkang's suspicion and Liu's anger. Sunflower is really sunny from germination to disk flowering. During the day, its leaves and disk follow the sun from east to west, but not immediately. Botanists have measured that its disk direction is about 12 degrees behind the sun, which is 48 minutes. After the sun goes down, the sunflower tray slowly swings back, facing east at about 3 am, waiting for the sun to rise. However, once the disc is in full bloom, it no longer turns to the sun, but is fixed in the east. Liu and Zhang Kangkang observe the sunflowers in full bloom, so they only see that they are motionless facing the east.

The purpose of green plants facing the sun is actually to make full use of sunlight for photosynthesis, so sunlight is actually phototropic. Although the ancients noticed the plant's positive orientation long ago (at the latest in the Three Kingdoms period, Cao Zhi's "Begging for Tongqin Table" said: "If the leaves of sunflower are tilted, the sun will not shine back for it, but it is sincere to finally turn to it." ), but only interpreted it as a "physical attribute", used as a metaphor, but did not think of using scientific methods to study its mystery. It was the father of biology that Darwin first studied the phototropism of plants. When he traveled around the world with the Beagle, he took some birds. In order to feed these birds, he planted a kind of grass called grass reed in the hut. It was dark in the cabin, and only the windows let in the sunlight. Darwin noticed that the grass seedlings curved towards the window. But in the next few decades, Darwin was busy creating the theory of evolution until his later years.

In order to study phototropism, a series of experiments have been carried out, and the results of these experiments are summarized in the book "Plant Mobility" published by 1880. Darwin did these experiments with grass seeds. When grass seeds germinate, the germ is covered with a layer of coleoptile, which first breaks through the ground to protect the germ from damage when unearthed. Darwin found that coleoptile is the key to phototropism. If seeds are planted in the dark, their coleoptiles will grow vertically upward. If the sun shines on the seedlings from one side, the coleoptile bends in the direction of the sun. If the top of the coleoptile is cut off or covered with opaque things, the coleoptile will not bend to light, although light can still illuminate the coleoptile. If the coleoptile is covered with transparent things, the coleoptile will bend to the light. Even if the coleoptile is buried with opaque black sand and only the top is left, the buried coleoptile will still bend to the light. Darwin speculated that a signal substance was secreted at the top of the coleoptile and transported down to the curved part, causing the coleoptile to bend towards light.

Darwin's discovery subsequently aroused great interest among biologists. 19 13 years, Danish biologist Peter Boijsen-Zhan Sen further verified Darwin's speculation. He cut off the tip of the coleoptile, coated the section with a layer of gel, and then put the tip back, keeping the phototropism of the coleoptile unchanged. But if you put an impermeable mica sheet in the middle instead of a gel, the phototropism disappears. In addition, only by inserting the mica sheet into the backlight side of the cross section can phototropism be prevented. If it is inserted on the side with light, the phototropism is normal. This shows that the signal substance is transmitted from the top of the coleoptile to the reverse light surface of the coleoptile, which makes the cells grow faster than the smooth surface and leads to bending. 19 18 A. Paal confirmed the result of Boyson-Jenson. He cut off the top of the coleoptile in the dark, irradiated it with light, and then put it back on the cross section of the coleoptile, but it was off center and put aside. He found that the coleoptile bent to the other side when growing.

In 1925, H. Soding found that if the coleoptile tip was cut off, the growth of coleoptile was inhibited, but if the cut coleoptile tip was put back, the growth of coleoptile returned to normal, indicating that the coleoptile tip contained signal substances that stimulated cell growth. 1926, Fritz Went, a Dutch graduate student, isolated this signal substance by a simple method. He cut off the top of the oat coleoptile and put it on agar for several hours. Then he put the agar on the residue of the coleoptile and found that agar could stimulate the growth of the coleoptile, indicating that something that could stimulate the growth penetrated into the agar from the top of the coleoptile. This substance was later called auxin. Two years later, Venter invented a method for quantitative determination of auxin activity. He put the agar soaked with auxin on one side of the remnant of the oat coleoptile, and in the dark, the oat coleoptile would bend to the other side. After growing in the dark for an hour and a half, the curvature of the coleoptile was measured. The greater the curvature, the stronger the auxin activity contained in agar (for example, the more coleoptile tips are used). This measurement method was later called oat test method. Venter also found that the uneven distribution of auxin led to the phototropism of plants. Let the light shine on the coleoptile tip from one side, then cut off the coleoptile tip and put it on two agar plates, one on the original backlight side and the other on the illumination side. A few hours later, the activity of auxin contained in these two agar plates was measured by oat test, and it was found that the one with backlight was almost twice as high as that with light.

So what kind of chemical is this auxin? Unfortunately, the amount of auxin in the tip of coleoptile is too small to extract, purify and determine its chemical structure. Scientists can only use substances extracted from other sources to determine their auxin activity through oat tests. 193 1 year, Dutch scientists Kogel and Arie J. Haagen-Schmidt extracted a substance that can stimulate plant growth from human Fritz Kaergel for the first time, and called it auxin A (that is, glyceryl trioleate). Kogel later extracted several auxins from human urine, among which β -indoleacetic acid has the strongest activity. In fact, it was extracted from fermentation broth as early as 1885, but people didn't know it was an auxin at that time. β -indoleacetic acid has become the first real auxin and the most important auxin. Now we have a certain understanding of the mechanism of auxin at the molecular level, but many details are still unclear. Simply put, this is the case: light (blue light is the most effective, and weak blue light can trigger phototropism in a second or two) irradiates the bud tip, which is absorbed by photoreceptors (some protein, including a flavoprotein called phototropic protein) and stimulates the synthesis of auxin. Light stimulates the auxin synthesis on the sunny side and the backlight side, but the auxin synthesis on the backlight side is three times higher. Auxin synthesized at bud tip is transported downward through vascular tissue and cell membrane.

Protein receptor binding stimulates cell wall elongation. Due to the high concentration of auxin in the backlight surface, the cells in the backlight surface are pulled longer, thus bending toward the light surface. Auxin also has many characteristics, one of which is that too high a content will inhibit rather than stimulate the growth of plants.

Now let's go back to sunflowers. Obviously, the reason why the leaves and disk of sunflower can rotate towards the sun is not necessarily "unless it has a bearing on its neck" as Liu Jiaoshou imagined. Under the irradiation of sunlight, the auxin content on the back of sunflower increases, which stimulates the cells on the back to elongate, thus slowly rotating towards the sun. After the sun goes down, auxin is redistributed, and the sunflower slowly turns back to its original position, that is, the east. After the disk was in full bloom, the sunflower stopped growing and fixed the disk in the east. Why should we finally face the east instead of the other direction or upward? This may be the result of natural selection, which is beneficial to the reproduction of sunflower. Sunflower pollen is afraid of high temperature. If the temperature is higher than 30 degrees Celsius, it will be burned. So you can avoid direct sunlight at noon and reduce radiation. In the early morning sunshine, the flower tray helps to dry the dew condensed at night and reduce the possibility of being attacked by mold. Moreover, in the cold morning, under the sunshine, the sunflower disk becomes a warm nest, which can attract insects to stay there to help pollinate.

Through the above introduction, I think it is enough to eliminate the confusion of Liu, Zhang Kangkang and some adults and children who have observed sunflowers. They don't believe in common sense, they can observe and verify by themselves, and they dare to challenge authority, which is commendable. Unfortunately, their observation was neither systematic nor meticulous, nor did they get enough professional information, so they were puzzled and even rushed to the conclusion that they had been cheated. On scientific issues, exploration and skepticism are not enough. Of course, some dictionaries and popular science articles are not rigorous enough or even wrong, so we should make corresponding changes.