Different Kinds of Sunflowers

Size

• A cliché of sunflowers is the image of a flower on a thick green stalk, taller than your head with a wide, open face of vivid yellow petals and a close-cropped brown center disk. In reality, sunflowers come in all sizes, from plants that grow only 1 to 2 feet high (the dwarf Sundance Kid produces a lot of flowers), to mid-height blooms at 3 to 4 feet (Ikarus grows a very uniform blossom), to tall flowers at 5 feet or more (Lyng's California Greystripe has feathery petals at about 7 feet). The skyscraper varieties, such as Cyclops, are referred to as giants. Some may grow as high as 15 feet tall with blooms over a foot wide.

Color

• Sunflowers are not all yellow with brown faces. In fact, some newer cultivars aren't yellow at all. Moulin Rouge is a mid-size to tall plant, between 4 and 6 feet, that produces vivid red petals around a black disk. Sunbeam is only 3 feet tall but the lemon-green center is huge, surrounded by a fringe of short, bright yellow petals. The Joker, at 6 feet tall, does a fade from a deep brownish-red center through the petals to yellow tips, and Velvet Queen, at 5 to 6 feet tall, is a clear, vibrant red with a rounded brown center. The pale sunflowers range from lemon-yellow with dark centers, such as 4-foot tall Valentine, to a tall white sunflower called Coconut Ice, with an almost black center and petals that progress from vanilla to glacier-white.

Seeds

• Some go for looks and other for snacks. Most sunflowers are prolific seed producers and seeds are appealing to people as well as hungry winter birds and raucous pet parrots. The seeds may be eaten raw or toasted, or the entire seed head can be set in the snowy yard for birds to graze. Harvest seeds when the green disk behind the flower starts to yellow. The seeds will ripen after that, even if you cut off the heads of the plants. The easy way to home-harvest seeds is to leave the flowers on the stalks. Once the petals fall off, cover the seed disk with a brown paper bag to keep birds from devouring your crop. When the back of the disk turns brown, the seeds will rub or fall off easily. Giant Grey Stripe and Mammoth Russian are two giant sunflowers that yield a lot of seeds.

Oil

• Solid black sunflower seeds produce the oil that is bottled and sold for cooking and salads. Sunflower oil is a light, nearly flavorless oil that is 68 percent linoleic acid, a good source of unsaturated fat. Seeds contain about 40 percent oil, so it is a high-yield crop plant. But other light oils that are by-products of food processing, such as corn and soybean oil, are cheaper to produce and easier to find in the market. If your plant produces small black seeds, it is an oilseed sunflower. The seeds may be fed to small birds. If the seeds are large and striped brown and white, you can fight the rest of the winged seed eaters for them. Striped sunflower seeds make excellent snacks for large parrots and people.