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.
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.
Great post. More please.
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