Sunny flowers

This scene couldn’t have been left unrecorded. We found it a few days ago when visiting the Kuusisto Manor I posted about in June (here). As the stems were rather high and quite far apart I couldn’t help taking a walk among them.

Overall, the sunflower is one of the most fabulous flowering plants to me. The ‘flower’, in fact, consists of an outer circle of yellow ray flowers, generally regarded as the ‘petals’, and a central flower head with hundreds of tiny disk flowers in a perfect spiral pattern.

I read it is a legend the sunflower would always turn the flower head towards the sun. The immature buds do follow the sun whereas the mature flowering heads face a fixed, often easterly, direction throughout the day. The below is a close-up of the five-petalled disk flowers or florets. An amazing plant, isn’t it? 

The field was such a big one I believe these sunflowers are being grown for the seeds. But I am wondering how the harvesting will work out when all the phases of reproduction from baby buds to seed formation are still found in the field. Even today, it is a challenging and risky occupation to be a farmer.