“On the Fifth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me Five Golden Rings.” Since I don’t wear much jewelry, instead of golden rings I would like to see golden flowers like sunflowers. The birds would like more sunflower seeds on this -11ºF morning so it would be better to have rings of yellow petals around the sunflower seed head. The sun even had a ring around it yesterday from the ice crystals in the air so memories of a warmer day is preferred.
Five Yellow Rings
A bird must have dropped a precious sunflower seed while it was trying to crack the seed open on the tree stump. At least the wayward seed is providing a sunny smile, even on this dark, rainy day and maybe the sunflower won’t freeze this weekend and will provide some more sunflower seeds later this fall.
Wayward Sunflower
On Saturday I posted a ‘creepy’ sunflower, but today’s sunflower looks worn out and tired, as I suspect there might be a few individual looking the same after enjoying a long, holiday weekend of fun and who are not ready to head back to work today.
Tired Sunflower
When the word sunflower is mentioned, I picture a field of sunny, smiling yellow sunflower heads lined up in row after row. But before those yellow heads appear, a creepier looking object emerges first, like a man eating plant from those early sci-fi movies which still often re-run on late Saturday nights.
Creepy Sunflower
Although the sun was out and make the snow bright, it didn’t feel too warm outside, so I rather see some sunflowers brightening the fields with busy bees buzzing around. But that dang groundhog said winter would be a long one!
Sunny Sunflowers
This newly opened sunflower is smiling in the sunshine and many others are smiling because it is Friday and the weekend is near.
The sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is an annual plant native to the Americas. The earliest known examples in the United States of a fully domesticated sunflower have been found in Tennessee, and date to around 2300 BC.
What is usually called the “flower” on a mature sunflower is actually a “flower head” (also known as a “composite flower”) of numerous florets (small flowers) crowded together. The outer petal-bearing florets (ray florets) are sterile and can be yellow, red, orange, or other colors. The florets inside the circular head are called disc florets, which mature into seeds.
The flower petals within the sunflower’s cluster are always in a spiral pattern. Generally, each floret is oriented toward the next by approximately the golden angle, 137.5°, producing a pattern of interconnecting spirals, where the number of left spirals and the number of right spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers. Typically, there are 34 spirals in one direction and 55 in the other; on a very large sunflower there could be 89 in one direction and 144 in the other. This pattern produces the most efficient packing of seeds within the flower head.
(And for those who haven’t had math class is a while, the Fibonacci numbers are the numbers in the following integer sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, …, where the first two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. And the sunflower uses 34 and 55 or 89 and 144.)
The Golden Sunflower
