Aurora, goddess of the dawn, fell in love with Tithonus, the son of King Laomedon of Troy, and took him to Olympus. The goddess asked her father Zeus to make him immortal and he agreed, but she had not thought to ask also that he should remain young. So Tithonus grew old but could not die. Twisted and immobilized by age, he prayed for death. Aurora, with a divine feeling for the natural fitness of things, turned him into a cricket that sings to her as the day warms.
he Mexican sunflower was first described by the British botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, who visited the United States in 1877. He came at the invitation of American botanist Asa Gray, who with Dalton intended to investigate the connection between the floras of eastern United States and those of eastern continental Asia and Japan.It was during this visit that he visited the American Southwest where—in addition to meeting Brigham Young—Hooker collected specimens of the plant, which he sent to England that year along with over a thousand others. Hooker, as the discoverer of the species, was entitled to give it a name, and for reasons that may forever remain fathomed, he named it after the prince who sings to the morning sun.
Though considered coarse by our doyen of Southern gardening, Elizabeth Lawrence (among others) she (along with those others) unfailingly mentions in the same breath that the Mexican sunflower (Tithonia roundifolia) sets Monet’s gardens at Giverny ablaze in late summer. Their orange-brushed branches tower over his gentle lines and mounds of green and blue, pink and purple, an aesthetic pedigree most appealing to those ladies, God love ’em.
