“ Keep your face
to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows. It’s what the sunflowers do.”
~ Helen Keller
~ 1880 ~ 1968
Though the sun
often dipped behind the clouds on this late August afternoon, the field of
sunflowers shone their beauty like little suns in the Sunflower Garden of St.
Luke’s Hospital, Anderson Campus, Easton, Pennsylvania.
A bee decided to
buzz in and photobomb this shot, landing on the sunflower in the foreground.
Young sunflowers
move to face the sun, a movement called heliotropism. Mature sunflowers
generally stop moving and remain facing East, which lets them be warmed by the
rising sun.
The sunflower
(or “soniashnyk”) is Ukraine’s national flower and has been grown on its central
and eastern steppes since the middle of the 18th century. And today,
in light of Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine, the sunflower is a symbol of
“I Stand With Ukraine!”
St. Luke’s also
has a Cosmos Field filled with their colorful, daisy-like blooms, as cosmos are
related to sunflowers and daisies.