Sunflower

An oilseed and ornamental crop, Helianthus annuus, domesticated by Indigenous peoples in North America roughly four thousand years ago; genetic and archaeological evidence points to domestication in eastern North America, complicating an older assumption that the crop was domesticated solely in Mexico. The domesticated sunflower is distinct from wild sunflower populations that still grow across North America. Spanish explorers carried sunflower seeds to Europe in the sixteenth century, and the crop later became a major oilseed in Russia and Ukraine from the nineteenth century onward, valued there in part because Russian Orthodox dietary restrictions on other fats during Lent did not apply to sunflower oil. Ukraine and Russia remain the largest modern producers of sunflower seed and oil.