Garden Digest

Helianthus annus (the sunflower)

You can only guard your sunflower taproots from the nibblers of the woods for so long....as I found out, again...just one more first-time gardener's lessons.  With the vivid images of fields of fully cultivated sunflowers in mind, it's no doubt disappointing to take your daily walk down onto the back slope to see that your shoots are shot, so to speak.  I can't think of a more amazing mature plant, though, and one well worth the attempt at that gardener's dream of fields of gold.

Held up in adoration to the point of being considered 'solar deities' by the Aztecs and other

indigenous peoples, the sunflower is a beautifully imposing figure out on the landscape (world's record height recorded at nearly 30 feet high) and one whose vivid textures sends out some serious vibrations, or what is more technically called inflorescence (a group of several flowers interconnected in one).

  
What maybe makes the sunflower most fascinating is the complexity of the heads themselves.  The flower petals within the sunflower's cluster are always in a pattern of interconnecting spirals – typically, there are 34 spirals in one direction and 55 in the other, all of this to the point where mathematicians have created numerical models to comprehend the intricacy, using terms like polar coordinates, Fibonacci numbers and Fermat's spiral!

Knowing just how hard it was for me to grow my own sunnies in the rocky clay soil, it's hard to believe that some farmers of mass commodities do in fact see the sunflower as a pest crop and cut it down as nothing more than feed.  I think I prefer the idea of Aztec deity.