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Outdoors: Sunflowers

Vincent Van Gogh, "Sunflowers" 1888/1889

Vincent Van Gogh and the Golden Spiral

With all of the buzz about Vincent Van Gogh this summer, we simply can’t escape images of sunflowers. Yes, he painted a lot of them and apparently, to this post-impressionist painter, sunflowers were a symbol of happiness and joy and he considered them sort of an artistic signature.

Van Gogh sunflowers are so ubiquitous, you’d think he invented them.

Hardly. Sunflower aren’t even native to The Netherlands.

These flowers are indigenous plants from Mexico where they were depicted in Pre-Hispanic motifs for centuries. To the Aztec people, sunflowers were a source of food and medicine, a symbol for war, and presumably, for them, these flowers had religious significance.

It’s rather easy to why the Mexican people called sunflowers the “shield flowers.” In spite of the fact that they are annuals, sunflowers have enormous flowerheads—sometimes as large as a shield.

Botanists consider sunflowers composites - meaning the flower head is made up of many individual flowers or florets, each which become a seed, and which are arranged in an elaborate spiral pattern.

Sunflower spirals are remarkable because they follow a pattern connected to the Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci series, a pattern which apparently evolved to ensure that as many seeds as possible are fitted into the seed head.

Biologists and mathematicians are not surprised to discover spirals following the mathematical sequence. Spirals of Fibonacci’s Series show up in everything from pine cones and Nautilus shells to honeycombs and hurricanes.

Spirals using the Fibonacci series –often called the “golden spiral” are found everywhere in nature - even in space. The arms of our own Milky Way Galaxy follow this pattern, as do the the supposedly random stars of most spiral galaxies. Take for example, Messier 63. galaxy a with a bright yellow central region and spiral arms some 37 million light years from Earth -The Sunflower Galaxy.

"Outdoors with Coggin Heeringa" can be heard every Wednesday on Classical IPR.