A field, at your finger
Move the sun. Every young head in the row will find it — slowly, the way a stem grows rather than the way a neck moves. Then let it go to dusk and watch what they do without being asked.
13 plants · 21 ray florets each · 89 disc florets, set at a divergence of 137.507° — the one angle that never lets a seed land on top of an older seed.
Young sunflowers are not devout. They are simply growing unevenly. In daylight the east side of the stem stretches faster and tips the head westward across the sky; overnight the west side catches up and swings it patiently back to face the sunrise. It is not a turning. It is a lopsided kind of growing that happens to look exactly like attention.
Then the plant matures, the stem stops elongating, and the whole business stops for good — every head in the field locked facing east, all of them, in unison, for the rest of their lives. This turns out to be the warm choice. An east-facing head takes the morning sun full-on and runs several degrees warmer than the field around it, and bees, who are cold and in a hurry, come to the warm flowers first. Five times more visitors, by some counts. The plant spends its youth following the light and its adulthood holding still in the one direction that brings company.