The sunflower in sixteenth-century Spain — a staked garden giant and a salad herb
Two Spanish printings eight years apart describe the sunflower as it actually was in Spain: a plant grown for the garden and for the pot, carrying seven competing names and a Peruvian provenance that modern genetics rejects. Fragoso in 1572 gives a recipe for eating its leaves; Monardes in 1580 says it must be staked or it will lie down, and refuses to be impressed by its turning to the sun. Neither mentions oil.
Why this wins its question: The sunflower's European history is normally a single sentence — introduced from the Americas in the sixteenth century, later became an oilseed — usually routed through the Russian story, with the Spanish decades left blank. This object fills those decades from two printings read on the page: seven competing Spanish names in 1572, a recipe for eating the leaves as salad, growth measured against a lance, a flower "mayor que vn gran plato" that has to be staked or it lies down, and a Sevillian physician already puncturing the heliotrope marvel by noting that many plants do it. It then does the thing the older literature does not, and sets the period's confident "yerua de Peru" against the modern genetic verdict that the plant was domesticated in eastern North America — naming the researchers who still argue for a second Mexican centre rather than presenting the question as settled.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Fragoso, printing at Madrid in 1572, introduces the plant as "vna famosa yerua de Peru, dotada con muchos nombres por su grande valor y excelencia", and lists seven of them: "Acerca de nosotros se dize Flor del Sol, y Gigantea. Otros la llaman Sol de las Indias, Corona real, Copa de Iupiter, Trompeta de amor, y Rosa de Hierico." A plant with seven competing names in one paragraph is a recent arrival that has not yet been fixed in the language.
He describes it as a plant already being grown and watched in Spain. The seed sown in hot weather comes up in very few hours; it grows so fast that in six months it rises higher than a lance, and in some places much more, thickening in the trunk especially in well-dunged and shady ground; "segun lo que se ha visto, es planta que en cada vn año nace y perece"; it throws no branches but a single stalk, from which come leaves somewhat like a gourd's but more pointed and heart-shaped. On top of the trunk it bears a fruit full of a resin like oil of fir but sweeter in smell, and a cut anywhere in the plant yields a liquor that sun and air turn to a gum.
The heliotropism is set out hour by hour, and in devotional language: the plant has "vna marauillosa propriedad entre otras, y es esta, que al salir del Sol se buelue hazia el, con lo alto de su tronco, como quien le haze reuerencia"; once the sun is well up it straightens and stays so until evening, when it turns the other way, "que no parece sino que se despide"; after sunset it straightens again and waits for the next day.
The same passage classes the sunflower as a vegetable and gives directions for cooking it: "Es planta de ortaliza, porque gustandola, no sabe mal, y assi se puede comer la hoja, quitados los palillos de do esta asida, y estregando con vn paño el vello que tiene: y si queremos hazerla ensalada, juntamos muchas hojas, y reboluiendolas en la mano, se van cortando con vn cuchillo, y se adereçan con azeyte, sal y especias, echadas en vn caço, y coziendo a fuego". What the first Spanish account recommends eating is the leaf, dressed with oil, salt and spices — not the seed.
Monardes at Seville, in the collected printing of 1580, gives the second witness under the heading "DE LA YERVA DEL SOL". Seed was still being sent to him, "aunque agora me embian la simiente della, aura algunos años que la tenemos aca" — some years already, at a date before 1580. He had seen it "de dos lanças en alto"; its flower is "la mayor flor y mas particular que jamas se ha visto, porque es mayor que vn gran plato", of diverse colours; the seed is "como pepitas de melon algo mayores"; and it "es menester que se arrime à alguna cosa quando se cria, sino estara siempre cayda". His verdict on its use is one line: it "parece muy bien en los jardines".
Monardes also supplies the period's own deflation of the marvel Fragoso had dressed in reverence. Having said that the flower turns continually toward the sun and is named for it, he adds flatly: "lo qual hazen otras muchas flores y yeruas". The counterpoint to the sunflower's wonder is printed by a Spanish physician within eight years of the wonder, and it is the correct observation.
Both witnesses treat the plant as a garden and kitchen object and neither mentions oil, pressing, or a seed crop. Taken together — a staked ornamental "muy bien en los jardines" and a pot-herb whose leaves are made into salad — they place the sunflower's sixteenth-century Spanish career outside the use it is now known for. Nothing here dates the shift to an oilseed crop, and no source is cited for it.
Fragoso's "yerua de Peru" is wrong, and the correction matters because the Peruvian label travelled with the plant. Population-genetic work on domestication alleles concludes that all surviving sunflower landraces descend from a single domestication centre in eastern North America, and that the sunflowers grown in Mexico today belong to that same cultivated lineage rather than to a separate Mexican domestication — Mexican landraces carry the domestication alleles while Mexican wild populations do not. The confidence here is held below 0.9 deliberately: the independent Mexican centre this study argues against is supported by other researchers reading pre-Columbian archaeological finds in southern Mexico, and the question is live rather than closed. What is not in dispute on this evidence is that the plant's homeland was North American, not Peruvian.
What this object does not claim. Neither Spanish source says how the plant reached Spain, in whose hands, by which route, or in what year, and no arrival date is asserted here — Monardes's "aura algunos años" before 1580 is the whole of the evidence read. The modern genetic study is cited only for the origin question it tests; it says nothing about Europe and supplies no dates for the Mexican archaeological material. Neither sixteenth-century writer records what indigenous American growers did with the plant, and nothing about that is claimed on their authority.