Sunflowers: Evil Geniuses (Genii?)

I currently have ten sunflowers shooting up like triffids all around my home, although admittedly two of them are recovering from unfortunate decapitation incidents.

Sunflowers rock. They grow terrifyingly quickly and can quite happily reach about ten feet in height. Although they’re a bit thick in some ways – what sort of flower flops in half if it’s not manacled to a stick? – they’re a bit clever in many others. For one thing, the big yellow flower that ultimately sprouts out at the top isn’t one flower but hundreds, which is why the flower is not called the ‘flower’ but the ‘head’. The yellow bits – petals, if you will – are just there to protect this mass of florets, each of which will eventually produce a new seed.

In one of those really cool-sounding facts that I simply lack the scientific knowledge to explain, the florets are organised in a way that somehow follows the Fibonacci Sequence – the sequence where you add the previous two numbers together, i.e. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 etc – and it all has something to do with an alleged Golden Ratio and somehow all of the florets are at unique angles from the centre thus rendering them efficient, but seriously, I have no idea.

On a level more suited to my intellect, sunflowers like the sun. Until they reach their full flowering stage, they have a slightly eerie tendency to follow the sun throughout the day, which explains their Latin name – helianthus, Helios being the Greek sun god – and the fact that their name in numerous other languages means ‘turn-sun’: tournesol in French, girasole in Italian, and so on. Motor cells in the stem control this heliotropism (sun-following), angling the head so that it gets the maximum amount of sunlight, thus allowing the sunflower to continue its inexorable growth. The scariest thing is that, having followed the sun from east to west during the day, the sunflower resets itself overnight and sits there in the darkness, facing the east, biding its time, waiting for the sun to reappear and feed it…

So, in conclusion, sunflowers are gigantic, multi-headed, beady-eyed mathematical geniuses with a life of their own. I think I ought to put the bloody things outside pronto before they tie me up and ransack the house.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Right. I’ve been gone for an age. The reasons are too tedious to explain, but now, like Whoopi Goldberg, I’m back in the habit and raring to turn ‘Fact of the Season’ back into ‘Fact of the Day’ – or at least ‘Fact of Every Few Days’.

For the last six weeks I have mostly been moving house and growing sunflowers. I had a few hours to spare in the midst of all that so I trotted along to the Boat Race, and today’s facts are brought to you courtesy of that rather spiffing event.

The University Boat Race has taken place almost every year since 1829, when some no-doubt-ghastly Cambridge student by the name of Charles Merivale (I mean, honestly) challenged his friend Charles Wordsworth of Oxford to a boat race at Henley. Wordsworth (nephew, by the by, of the Wordsworth) was a student at Christ Church College, and his crew wore dark blue in honour of that college’s colours. It wasn’t until a few years later that Cambridge decided they also rather liked blue, and started wearing light blue, in homage either to Eton school or Caius College, Cambridge.

After a few years at Henley and on the stretch of river from Westminster to Putney, the Boat Race relocated to its current course, from Putney to Mortlake. The course is, for reasons best known to itself, exactly 4 miles and 376 yards long – that’s 6779 metres – and the current course record is 16 minutes and 19 seconds. The end of the course is marked with the ‘University Stone’ on the south side and, on the north side, a post painted in dark and light blue stripes.

Cambridge has so far won the race 79 times to Oxford’s 75. On four occasions one of the boats has sunk during the race, and both crews went under in 1912. (This photo is the Cambridge crew of 1978.) There was a bit of a kerfuffle in 1877, when the race adjudicator passed out pissed under a bush at the end of the course; when he came to, he declared the race to have been ‘a dead heat – to Oxford by four feet’.

But possibly the most bizarre Boat Race fact is that Hugh Laurie rowed for Cambridge in 1980.