Single Record
Participant Info
- Species
- Helianthus annuus [Helianthus aridus]
- Family
- Asteraceae
- CommonName
- common sunflower
- Presence
- YES
- Status
- native
- EarliestDate
- 1916
- LatestDate
- 2020
- Ecosystem
- basin, shrubland, foothill, montane, ruderal, urban
- Geobotanical
- SSawatch, Garitas, SSanjuans, NCristos
- Counties
- Alamosa, Conejos, Costilla, Hinsdale, Mineral, Rio Grande, Saguache
- Passes
- Wolf Creek
- WildlifePreserves
- Great Sand Dunes
- Other Localities
- Alamosa (town), Del Norte
- PhotoRecords
- YES Rich Haswell: Rio Grande Co, South Fork vacant lot 28 July 2013; Del Norte private yard 17 Sept 2020
- Comments
- Around the Watershed, common sunflower is, well, common, so much so it is not much collected any more. It loves roadsides and vacant lots. In late summer it lines the highways and byways with bright yellow. It is native to the western USA and has spread to every state east. It follows the Rio Grande drainage all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Note that culinary and crop cultivars of H. annuus can occasionally escape (see the photorecord of a plant in a vacant lot of South Fork, Rio Grande Co, 2013). Cultivated or not, the seeds in a head form the intersection of left and right sprials, the numbers of which are sequential Fibonacci numbers. As with a pine cone, this arrangement packs the seeds as efficiently as possible (Roger V. Jen, 1994).
- Annotation