Why don’t sunflowers fall over?

CrowdScience

BBC

Science, Technology

4.8 • 985 Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With huge heads on top of spindly stalks, how do sunflowers defy gravity to stay standing? That was a question sent to CrowdScience by listener Frank, whose curiosity was piqued by the towering sunflowers on his neighbour’s deck. They stay up not only when the weather is fine, but, even more impressively, during strong winds. Could this feat of strength, flexibility and balance inspire the construction of tall buildings?

It's a question that takes presenter Anand Jagatia to a sunflower festival in England, to see how the sunflower’s long evolutionary lineage has honed its structure. And from tall flowers to tall buildings, we turn to structural engineers, asking how these concepts factor into the design of the world’s tallest skyscrapers. Can ideas drawn from sunflowers or other natural structures help buildings withstand wind, or even storm surges?

Contributors: Stuart Beare, partner and grower at Tulley’s Farm Roland Ennos, Visiting Professor in Biological Studies, University of Hull Sigrid Adriaenssen, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University Koichi Takada, founder of Koichi Takada Architects

Presenter: Anand Jagatia Producer: Tom Bonnett Editor: Cathy Edwards Production Co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano Studio Manager: Bob Nettles

(Image: Tall Sunflower blooming in a field, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Credit: Naomi Rahim via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:08.0	Exactly.
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0:10.4	A miraculous mystic or a die-hard deviant. I think there's some bad stuff in there. I do weirdly respect him.
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0:32.0	Evil genius listen on BBC sounds. Evil Genius.
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0:35.0	You know I've never actually seen a sunflower up close in real life.
0:41.0	What a sheltered life I lead? They just make you smile, don't they?
0:47.0	Hello and welcome to crowd science from the BBC World Service. I'm Anand Jagatier. We're standing on a little hill and rolling landscape all around us is just full of these gorgeous yellow sunflowers. It's amazing.
1:00.0	Thank you. I'm with Stuart Bea at Tully Sunflower Festival in the south of England,
1:05.0	and I can safely say I've now seen more sunflowers than I can count.
1:09.0	The last batch of sunflowers that we planted, they've all flowered at the same time, I think.
1:13.6	And we've got about a million blooms here in the field.
1:16.8	A million.
1:18.9	Wandering through these fields is like moving through a golden sea of flowers, all shining back up at their namesake in the sky.
1:26.0	And I have to say that up close, sunflowers are surprisingly large.
1:31.0	Each of these sunflower heads is basically the size of like, well nearly the size of my head.
1:37.0	So yeah, they are, they're pretty big, yeah.
	...

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