Visiting a Sunflower field

Fields with sunflowers always make me happy since I like these beautiful flowers very much and they look very friendly. Commercially sunflowers are planted to harvest their seeds to create sunflower oil and additions to bread and other baking products. But I simply like the flowers for their size and their beautiful yellow color. There are only very few flowers that get that big.

I just read tha young sunflowers point their heads in the direction of the sun. At dawn, the head of the flower faces east and moves west throughout the day. When sunflowers reach full maturity, they no longer follow the sun and continuously face east. Young flowers reorient overnight to face east in anticipation of the morning. This is something that I find very interesting and in addition to the yellow color this is probably the reason why it is called sunflower.

Closeup picture of a sunflower. Picture: Florian Glechner.

Sunflowers at a field. Picture: Flroian Glechner.