The Hard-Working Beauty of Sunflowers Deborah Greig, left, and Glenn Marcuss pulling a sunflower plant at East New York Farms in Brooklyn. THE difference between a vacant lot and a community garden comes down to a single thing: a sunflower. Helianthus annuus is not just a plant but a kind of logo, said Deborah Greig, 30, an urban agriculture coordinator at East New York Farms in Brooklyn. She seems to have a knack for brand management. Once you're shoveling manure, advertising is a logical next step. "They're a really iconic way to make people notice that you're trying to make a change in the community," Ms. Greig said. There's not a lot of green space in East New York. The half-acre plot she helps manage, the United Community Centers Youth Farm, lies almost in the shadow of the second-to-last-stop on the No. 3 train. The main mission here is to help the neighborhood grow its own nourishing food. But a perimeter of brilliant sunflowers, towering over the cyclone fence, seems to function like commercial signage, she said. The sturdy sunflower does not shrink from a little "hard labor, too," Ms. Greig added. I think they do some catching of the trash that blows in. At the South Bronx community garden La Finca del Sur, she said, growers are experimenting with sunflowers in a soil-treatment practice called phytoremediation. In field tests last summer, the plant's deep taproots seemed to pull heavy metal contaminants like mercury and lead from the garden's polluted soil. When the sunflower isn't doing dirty work, it dresses up nicely. This year, Ms. Greig and her friend Molly Culver, 31, will include sunflowers in designs for a half-dozen weddings as part of a side business called Molly Oliver Flowers. Many of these blooms will come from the Youth Farm at the High School for Public Service in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where Ms. Culver is a manager. "We're planting around 150, or more, every other week through the end of June," Ms. Culver said. The farm supplies an on-site market and a cut-flower Community Supported Agriculture operation. All told, Ms. Culver will be raising more than 1,000 sunflowers in the concrete heart of Brooklyn. As it turns out, this is a perfectly natural place for a sunflower to be. When Ms. Greig and Ms. Culver - and I - stocked up on sunflower seeds this winter, we were joining a gardening tradition that goes back some 5,000 years. Helianthus annuus is the quintessential American flower. And its path to the garden each year is a kind of tall, shaggy tale, rather like the sunflower stalk itself. Sunflowers are likely the second-oldest domesticated seed crop in eastern North America. Squash came first. Archaeological digs in the river valleys of Appalachia (sites with names like Cloudsplitter and Napoleon Hollow) have identified the burned hulls of cultivated sunflower seeds from 4860 B.P. (or before present). Other sites in Mexico may be older still. New York's pre-colonial dwellers, the Lenape, likely planted sunflowers at the edges of the maize fields alongside their camps. In Brooklyn, the Lenape might have sowed sunflowers near Gravesend and the Gowanus Creek. Other fields lay in Harlem, north of a settlement called Konaande Kongh. In the Bronx, the Lenape planted near Hunts Point and Clason Point. From the accounts and detailed drawings of European explorers along the Eastern Seaboard, these sunflowers were of the common cultivated variety, macrocarpus. The plants reached seven or eight feet tall and formed a single large head. Wild sunflowers grow with a branched habit and form numerous smaller heads. Writing in 1951, the eminent American sunflower taxonomist Charles B. Heiser Jr. concluded that oil from the crushed seeds "was used chiefly to anoint the hair." This practice could still be observed in the Iroquoian tribes of Ontario in the 1940s. On other occasions, the seeds "were roasted over a fire, then pounded and cooked with roasted white corn, sweetened with maple sugar and used in somewhat the same way we use lard." If this ur-comfort food doesn't turn up soon at the Brooklyn Flea, I'm canning it in a Leifheit jar and selling it myself.