Field Notes—

Gratitude Grows In The Sunflower

By Curtiss Clark

How may times have you heard gardeners say that they pursue their avocation to unwind, to destress from the work week, to reconnect with the natural world in a therapeutic way? If you are like me, you have even heard yourself riff on some variation of this theme, presenting humankind’s partnership with nature as a kind of antidote to the toxins of the pressured life.

If you wish to continue in this belief, please divert your eyes from our vegetable garden this year. It is a shambles, casting up a bumper crop of disappointment and vexation through a tangled mulch of withered squash vines, blighted tomato plants, and scorched pepper plants. It is far more distressing than destressing.

Flowers, on the other hand, seem to have taken to this summer better than our vegetables. And of all the flowers in the yard, the most impressive are the loitering gangs of sunflowers that have been fending for themselves, unhindered by the attentions of the resident gardeners. Most of them were planted by careless birds, who dropped bits of their cadged caches of black oil sunflower seeds in the flyways near the feeders. The rest were cast in the dirt by Kate to fill in around the original bird bunches.

The sunflowers are all up and nodding their sunny heads in affirmation of the late summer breezes, detoxifying our grouchy negative view of the tomato crop by being positively positive. They really do seem to right what’s wrong with the world — and not just in a figurative sense.

Following the catastrophic 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union, scientists launched floating rafts of sunflowers in the ponds near the site, not to impart a cheerful aspect to what was arguably the most depressing place on earth, but to extract the radionuclides Cesium 137 and Strontium 90 that had contaminated the water as a result of the accident. Sunflowers have proven to be adept at accumulating both radiation and heavy metals in their root systems in phytoremediation (plant remedy) projects around the world, greatly simplifying the recovery and disposal of toxic contaminants from both soil and water.

The extraordinary benefits bestowed on civilization by sunflowers are nothing new. Native Americans have been feeding, healing, and even grooming themselves with wild sunflowers and the oil from their seeds for 8,000 years, and the plant has been under cultivation here for half of that time. It is one of just four crops native to North America that now enjoy worldwide markets. (The others are blueberries, cranberries, and pecans.)

The simplest gift of the sunflower, however — and probably the most revered — is the bold and unabashed beauty of its blossom. The human eye seems to be drawn to it, just as the flower itself is drawn to the sun in its bud stage. The French call sunflowers tournesol, inspired, no doubt, by this phototropic trait. (Most sunflowers face east once they are in full bloom.) The south of France is blanketed with vast sunflower fields, and they are particularly associated with Provence, thanks to the genius of Vincent van Gogh, who did a series of sunflower paintings, mostly in Arles, in 1888 and 1889.

Even in the deep despair at the tragic end of van Gogh’s life, his beloved sunflowers still stood as a beacon. Writing to his sister, Wil, he revealed, “I feel the desire to renew myself, and to try to apologize for the fact that my pictures are, after all, almost a cry of anguish, although in the rustic sunflower they may symbolize gratitude.”

The allure of the flower attracts not only artists, but mathematicians as well.

Have you ever looked closely at the seed pattern in the head of a sunflower? The seeds spiral both clockwise and counterclockwise from the center. Mathematicians have been able to reproduce this pattern by using an algorithm that locates a seed every 137.50776 degrees of rotation. This number doesn’t seem very special, but it is related to the ratios of sequential Fibonacci numbers.

The sequence of numbers known as a Fibonacci series includes numbers that are the sum of the previous two in the series (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, for example.) If you count the seeds in a clockwise and a counterclockwise spiral on a sunflower head, you usually get two consecutive numbers in a Fibonacci series. The Fibonacci spiral, coincidently, prescribes the limits of the Greek’s Golden Rectangle, an artistic expression of perfection.

So when those poor precincts of nature in our yard that are dependent upon the care of gardeners wilt and wither in the constraints of that partnership, we look to the rustic sunflower as the symbol of our gratitude that not everything is riding on our limited human skills. The most perfect blossoms of the summer, it turns out, are the work of careless birds, who will return to those same blossoms in the fall to pluck new found seeds from the consequences of their old lost seeds. And knowing nothing of art and mathematics, they will sing a song of serendipity.

(Portions of this column first appeared in an essay by Curtiss Clark entitled “The Seductive Sunflower: Working Its Way In The World” published in the Home and Garden section of The Bee in March 2002. More than 70 essays in the Field Notes series can be found at www.field-notebook.com.)