We’re entering prime time this week for that signature flower of summer, the sunflower.
The smile-inducing faces of these huge flowers have long been a garden favorite as well as a farm crop that’s stunning enough to draw tourists.
Besides their head-turning showiness, sunflowers are a chief example of how plants are more ingenious than we think.
If you’ve ever paid close attention to a line of sunflowers, you might have noticed that the flower faces turn into the prevailing light. It’s an evolutionary skill called “phototropism” that’s designed to maximize the plant-fueling ability of the sun.
But what’s even more remarkable is how sunflowers in a dense planting grow in a zig-zag pattern so that each plant isn’t blocking its neighbor’s light.
It’s almost as if the plants are saying, “You go this way, and I’ll go that way,” in order for all to get as much sunlight as possible.
Argentinian researchers discovered that curiosity in a 2017 study, and physicist Chantal Nguyen confirmed it last year in a study at the University of Colorado.
Nguyen wrote in a post for The Conversation website that “this spontaneous pattern formation is a neat example of self-organization in nature… Plants are much more dynamic than people give them credit for.”
The 2017 researchers compared the naturally zig-zagging sunflowers with a similar dense planting that was constrained to grow upright without leaning and found that the zig-zagged plants produced more oil.
If you’re growing sunflowers for reasons other than phototropic amusement or maximum oil, you’ll find them to be as nature-friendly as they are strikingly beautiful.
Both annual and perennial sunflowers are U.S. natives that are pollinator favorites. They provide both pollen and nectar for numerous bees and butterflies, and according to Penn State Master Gardeners, nutritious seeds for at least 45 different species of birds.
Sunflowers also happen to be one of the easiest flowers to start by direct-planting its seed, making it an inexpensive option. The main challenge is keeping birds from pulling out young seedlings soon after they’ve emerged and keeping rabbits from nipping off the young shoots.
The most popular sunflowers are still the classic, tall, single-flowered types that can easily grow six feet tall (the world record is 30 feet) and that produce face-sized heads that eventually fill with seeds.
Technically, these aren’t just one flower but a cluster of hundreds of tiny flowers, each of which produces a seed.
The big breakthrough lately, though, is the arrival of the so-called “thousand-bloom” sunflowers that send out numerous side branches and produce gobs of smaller but still very showy flowers along each branch.
Available only in plant form, these go by such names as SunBelievable, Suncredible, and Sunfinity. They’re a bit pricy, but they’re blooming machines right up to frost.
Read more about how to grow sunflowers here.
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