A very strange feature of the sunflower is that it always opens toward the sun, and wherever the sun goes, its "face" is facing. So, are sunflowers really a plant that particularly loves sunlight? In fact, it is not, sunflowers like to bloom towards the sun, but because there is something in the sunflower that is afraid of light.
But sunflowers like to turn toward the sun, not because they like the sun, but because of the photophobic auxin inside it. At the stem of the disc, there is a substance called "auxin", which promotes the division of cells, so that the plant stem grows rapidly.
However, this auxin is particularly afraid of light. Once the light hits, it quickly hides, so during the day it only gathers on the backlit side of the stem. Once auxin is gathered on the backlight surface, it means that the growth rate of this side is faster than that of the light surface, so the stem of the backlight is on top, and the flower disc on this side will also be lifted upwards, and it will naturally tilt towards the light surface.
Therefore, the sunflower's face will always "smile" towards the sun, all because this auxin is "at work". Throughout the day, auxin has been hiding from the sun, so that the backlit side of the sunflower is always higher than the light side, and the flower plate and body are naturally inclined to the sun.
So in theory, it is not the sunflower that is rotating, but the auxin that is moving, and the sunflower itself is just growing "unevenly". Sunflowers, a phenomenon that is always facing the sun, are called "rotation toward the light".
However, sunflowers do not rotate exactly with the sun, and auxin, although it can promote growth, does not promote it to that point. The growth of the stem also takes a certain amount of time. According to botanists, this time difference is about 48 minutes, that is, the direction of the flower disc will be about 12 degrees behind the sun.
Seeing this side, some flower friends may think, what if there is no sun? Won't the flower tray move? For example, at night. In fact, when the sun goes down, the auxin of the sunflower will be redistributed, and the redistribution will also cause the sunflower to rotate, but this time it is slowly rotated back to the original direction, that is, the east.
The sunflowers originally turned in their direction to the east, slowly turning from the sun down and returning to the east around three o'clock in the morning. And the sunflower is not from small to large in rotation, generally in the germination to flowering time, it will follow the sun, and when the flower disc blooms, it will be fixed to the east.
What do you think? Usually, we only care about the melon seeds, do we not think about the sunflower itself, even if we know that the sunflower has such a magical property, we have not carefully considered the reason? In fact, there are many magical places in plants that are worth exploring. In addition to being able to feel the beauty brought to us by plants, we can also experience the novelty that plants bring us!