Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 March 1883 — The Sunflower’s Fidelity to the Sun. [ARTICLE]

The Sunflower’s Fidelity to the Sun.

That the sunflower follows the sun in its westward journey is well known, but when does it turn its face back again to the east to greet the morning sun ? Mr. C. A. White, of Washington, in a letter to' Nature, relates an incident which throws some light upon the subject. One evening, he says, during a short stay at a village in Colorado, in the summer of 1881, I took a walk along the banks of a long irrigating diteh? justas the sun was setting. The

ty of Helianthus annus grew abundantly there, and I observed that the broad faces of all the flowers were, as usual in the clear sunset, turned to the west. Returning by the same path less than ait hour afterward, and immediately after the daylight was gone, I found to my surprise that much the greater part of those flowers had already turned their faces full to the east in anticipation, as it were, of the sun’s rising. They had in that short time retraced the semicircle, in the traversing of which, with the sun, they had spent the whole day. Both the day and Hight were cloudless, and apparently no unusual conditions existed that might have exceptionally affected the movements of the flowers.