I've used a texture on a plane for this sunflower, but instead of only the diffuse part of the mix of shaders casting shadows, the transparent shader is also casting a shadow with the shape of the 2x1 plane, where as I said earlier only the flower should cast the shadow as it is a diffuse shader. The texture is packed into the blend file. Texture link:
http://s2.postimg.org/thhlmfi15/tilemap.png