🌻🌼🌷 I love Plants 🌷🌼🌻
🌻 Especially Sunflowers 🌻
Source: Pixabay taken by Ralphs_Fotos
"They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds."
Dinos Christianopoulos
“Globally, awareness of the association between sunflowers and Ukraine has grown since Feb. 24, the first day of the invasion, when the news outlet Ukraine World shared a video on Twitter showing a Ukrainian woman in Henychesk giving sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers, with the striking instruction to put the seeds in their pockets so the flowers will grow where they die.
(...) But the flower has an even longer history in the country. Sunflowers—soniashnyk in Ukrainian—have been grown in Ukraine since the mid-18th century. … The ubiquitous presence of the sunflower in the villages and countryside of Ukraine has made it an unofficial national symbol ... . Throughout Ukraine’s history, the flower has been used as a symbol of peace …” - reported
by Abby Vesoulis.
“According to an entry in the
1993 Encyclopedia of Ukraine,
Spaniards brought sunflowers from the New World to Europe in the early 17th century. The flowers were subsequently introduced in Ukraine in the mid-18th century. Ukrainians snacked on the flower’s seeds or crushed them into oil. Used in cooking or exported to other countries, the oil proved popular in the Eastern European country as an alternative to butter and lard, which were prohibited by the Orthodox Church during Lent”, reports Joe Sommerlad for
the Independent.
“For Ukrainians, sunflowers’ cultural significance goes beyond their prolific growth and role as an economic driver. As Olivia B. Waxman writes for
Time
, the flower has historically represented peace. In June 1996, ministers from the United States, russia and Ukraine marked Ukraine’s nuclear weapon disarmament by planting sunflowers at the Pervomaysk missile base. As U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry said at the ceremony, per the Washington Post’s James Rupert, the three nations’ shared goal was “ensuring that our children and our grandchildren will live in peace.”
Source article from
the Smithsonian
by Antonia Mufarech.