6 Sensational Facts About Sunflowers

Sunflowers are such an iconic flower that everyone is familiar with, they are the only flower that have really stood the test of time and have remained super popular throughout the world for years and years.  They are just so bright, chirpy and make one feel beautiful nostalgia every time they lay eyes on one.  Sunflowers are actually pretty cool flowers with heaps of uses and other facts most people have no clue of. So, without further ado, here are 6 fun facts you probably didn’t know about these awesome flowers!

1. Every Sunflower head is made up of heaps of little, tiny miniature flowers.

Those big yellow petals, and the brown fuzzy centres that everyone knows and loves about sunflowers, actually don’t know that they are mini individual flowers. The yellow petals are called the ray florets, and the brown fuzzy centre are called the disc florets. As much as 2,000 miniature flowers (florets) make up the sunflower head.

2. Sunflowers make great scrubbing pads!

Once all the seeds have fallen off the sunflower, the sunflower head can be turned into a pretty darn durable scrubbing pad and can perform cleaning duties that most conventional sponges and scrubbing pads can! Just a cool little life hack!

3. Sunflowers can be used to rid the environment of nuclear radiation!

It’s true! Sunflowers are absolutely sensational for drawing toxins from the atmosphere, even nuclear radiation! The Japanese planted millions after the Tsunami destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

     4. The tallest sunflower ever stood over 10 metres!

Yep, that’s right. Measuring at approximately 30 feet and 1 inch, a man named Hans-Peter Schiffer (who has held this record twice before) grew the beautiful giant in Germany.

      5. Young sunflowers follow the sun.

Sunflowers are known to display a behaviour called heliotropism, this when the young flower buds face east in the morning and follow the sun as the world rotates throughout the day. But this only happens in younger flower heads because when they get heavier after seed production the stems will stay facing east.

      6.  In French, their name actually means following the sun!

As mentioned in fact 5, sunflowers in their bud phase actually seek out and follow the sun. In fact, in French the word for sunflower is “tournesol” which means “turns with sun”. Cool, right?

Well, this blog post has a been a bit different from our previous posts, but it’s definitely interesting to know a few cool facts about the plants themselves that most people don’t know! So now you have 6 more reasons to love and enjoy sunflowers even more than you already do!