The Glorious Sunflower - the Fourth Sister in a Native American Garden

In one of my earlier blog posts I wrote about the Native Americans' Three Sisters Garden (corn, beans and squash ) but I neglected to tell you of the Fourth Sister...a very important member of this family!

This is from Hubpages: 

"Fourth Sister, didn't look anything like her other sisters, although she was as tall and as slender as First Sister (corn) . That seemed fair to all, because Third Sister and Second Sister shared similar but different features. They could climb and run, while their other two sisters were forced to stand tall and proud."

Mother Sun explained that each sister had her job and each had to benefit from and protect one another.  But Fourth Sister's job was most important of all -- for she was the guardian of the North, planted firmly, to protect others from the robbers who soon would come.

The fourth sister was the elegant sunflower.

The Sisters are known to the Native Americans as the “mothers of life”  but they all need each other to survive. 

• Corn uses the nitrogen supplied by the nitrogen fixing roots of the beans and provides a place for the beans to climb.
• The squash suppresses weeds and keeps the soil shaded and moist.
• The prickly leaves of the squash provide a deterrent from four legged raiders of corn.

So what does the Sunflower do?

Taiyo Sunflower (click here)

The sunflowers keep the birds from devouring the corn.

How? Well, true sunflowers exhibit the heliotropic habit of following the sun through the day but when they are full of sunflower seeds they stay facing the east.

Thus when sunflowers are planted to the north of the garden patch, the birds see the sunflowers first thing in the morning sun and dine on the sunflower seeds rather than the corn kernels....
 

from Rainy Side Gardens

The FOUR SISTERS celebrate the harmony of nature and bring abundance to farmers and happiness to the well fed home.

By the way, the true giant sunflower is used as an emblem of the philosophy of Spiritualism.

They see the sunflower as forever looking to the light and applaud its unique arithmetic: supposedly each sunflower has 12 sets of leaves ( months in a year) , 52 yellow petals (52 weeks in a year) and 365 seeds (365 days in a year). I cannot verify this but that is the story..... I hope it is true.

Here is a wonderful farmer talking about his sunflower field - the birds are very happy here!