The Golden Glow of Sunflowers

It's obvious that summer is coming to an end because the sunflowers are blooming. The yellow of the sunflowers will soon be seen in the yellow of the school buses and the golden leaves that will fall off the trees. The sunflowers, along with rabbitbrush, curlycup gumweed, and several other yellow-blossoming plants, make me feel a tiny bit sad because they indicate that the days are getting shorter.

On the other hand, sunflowers are one of my favorite flowers because they always seem to be happy flowers. No matter how their day is going, they look perky and ready for whatever is coming their way.

Their bright color and habit of following the sun across the sky while in the bud stage (called heliotropism) makes me smile. This flower is practically dancing the way it can move.

I had the opportunity to observe these sunflowers at a birthday party at a small reservoir near our house. I'll be talking more about the party in a later post. The sunflowers are growing above the high water line, so you can see that the lake has shrunk quite a bit. That's common every year due to evaporation and use of the water for irrigation.

Okay, I couldn't help it, I took a lot of photos of these sunflowers! The late afternoon sun illuminated them from behind, and the bright blue desert sky provided a good backdrop.

Here's a little pollinator on the sunflower (look on the right side of the brown part, and click on the photo if you want to see a bigger image). These late-blooming flowers allow many species to survive later in the year.

Sunflowers are part of the Aster family, the largest family of flowering plants in the world, with over 20,000 species. North America has 2,500 species, including some common flowers like daisies, coneflowers, and Black-eyed Susans. Marigolds, chrysanthemums, and dandelions are also Asters. Want to eat one? Try lettuce or artichokes, also members of this huge family.

One of the neat things about sunflowers is that each flower is actually a composite of many flowers (the family name used to be Compositae). The brown disk in the middle is made up of many individual flowers, and each of the yellow ray flowers that come off the disk is also a flower.

Okay, you've seen enough of my obsession with sunflowers. So what do you think of when you see a sunflower?