Flowering Fridays: Sunflowers

There is always an element of surprise to the sunflowers in our garden. I never know where they will turn up, as the majority of our plants are volunteers that sprout out of the compost we add to the garden. I always plant a bed of sunflowers, but the true fun for me is seeing where else in the garden they decide to take root.

I especially love the giant sunflowers, towering up to eight feet tall and leaning their heads over me, as if they want to come closer and listen. Mary Oliver in her poem, The Sunflowers, writes: 

"they are shy / but want to be friends…" 

"each of them… is lonely, the long work of turning their lives into a celebration / is not easy."

The center of the plant — and its sacred spiraling shape — holds exquisite beauty for me. And puts me in utter awe of the amazing capacity of God and nature.

According to Wikipedia (my new best friend), the spiraling florets are each oriented at approximately the golden angle — about 137 degrees — and "the number of left spirals and the number of right spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers."

I'm not sure I get exactly what all that math means, but I get that there is a highly ordered structure to the plant— and from this order comes the plant's captivating, swirling center.

Where in your life do you sense a higher order at work — the underlying patterns of the universe at play?

I also love the lyrical names of some of the sunflower varietals — Dwarf Sunspot. Ring of Fire. Evening Sun. Autumn Beauty. Lemon Queen. Soraya. Arikara. The cuddly Teddy Bear. And the heartfelt Valentine. Amazing how something can hold such poetry when we name it with reverence.

Yesterday morning as I was getting ready, I noticed one of the sunflower's in our bathroom bouquet seemed to hold a message for me.

Pardon the poor picture quality. But can you see the heart made out of the pollen? The formation was gone today — but the message was not lost.

 Yes, sunflowers, I get your love. And yes, I want to be friends.

So, tell me, what do you see in the sunflower?