Well, hello there Okanagan sunflower

Does it make me some sort of botany geek if I admit to getting a little over-excited by the sight of the first Okanagan sunflower blooms?

The City of Kelowna's official flower and emblem starts to burst into colour the first week of April every year.

Yet, somehow, the blossoming is always surprising, fresh and new and exhilarating.

This revelation comes to me and my wife, Kerry, and our dog, the apropos-named Daisy, during a hike along Kalamoir Regional Park's Sunnyside Trail in West Kelowna.

I give the shout out to our pup Daisy because the Okanagan sunflower is part of the aster family of flowers, which includes, you guessed it, the daisy.

Anyway, with that tie-in, we have Daisy (the dog, not the flower) pose with a cluster of Okanagan sunflowers for a photo.

Daisy even seems to sniff the Okanagan sunflower appreciatively before continuing her amble down the trail.

By the way, although the Okanagan has claimed this particular type of sunflower with the name of the Valley, the plant has a wider territory that includes most of southern BC east of the Coast and Cascade mountains, into southern Alberta and south to interior Washington state, South Dakota, Colorado and northern California.

Kalamoir is one of the first places the Okanagan sunflower blooms every spring because it has lightly-treed, sunny, southeast-facing slopes the plants love

The Okanagan sunflower is of note for several reasons.

It's one of the first wildflowers to bloom in the Valley every spring.

Each plant is about a foot high and features several striking yellow flowers, as if in a bouquet.

The plants are abundant on dry, sunny, well-drained mountainsides, meadows and clearings in conifer forests.

Since the Thompson Okanagan is rife with this kind of topography, the flowers thrive, putting on a showy wash of spring-time yellow.

The flamboyant display is short and intense with the flowers bursting on the scene at the beginning of April and gone by the end of May.

Technically, the Okanagan sunflower is known as arrowleaf balsamroot or balsamorhiza sagittata in Latin.

It's so named because its green-silver upright leaves are shaped like arrowheads and its strong taproot has a resin that has a balsam fragrance and taste.

Deer, bighorn sheep, elk, gophers, mice and birds all like to feast on the plant, flowers and seeds.

The Okanagan sunflower is also important in Indigenous history.

The peoples peeled and ate the raw tender inner portion of the flower stems, ate the leaves raw or boiled and roasted the seeds and taproot to grind into flour.

They also used the root as an immune-stimulator and the plant's sap as a natural disinfectant.