• Flower Delivery
• About Clare Florist
• Contact Us
• Login

With the sunshine finally (and very slowly!) approaching us, it's the perfect time to decorate your houses with some summery flowers that will make you smile. Looking through our summer collection, I stumbled across our bouquet of sunflowers that are currently on special offer:

Sensational Sunflowers from Clare Florist

And what represents the joy of being under glorious sunshine better than sunflowers?

Not only are sunflowers one of the more useful flowers - producing sunflower seeds and sunflower oil for our consumption just to name a few, they are also known to symbolise longevity and adoration. At the more political end of the spectrum, they are also the symbol of a world free of nuclear weapons which stemmed from their representation of hope.

Some interesting trivia about sunflowers:

• According to legends, the original form of the sunflower was a water-nymph named Clytie. Besotted by the beauty of the Sun God, Apollo, she would stare at him all day. Her love was never returned, and after starving herself for 9 days, she became rooted to the ground, and other gods who took pity on her turned her into the sunflower. Today she is still in love with the Sun!
• The sunflower myth - if a girl puts three sunflower seeds down her back, she will marry the first boy she meets. Hmm..not sure I would like to try that.
• The florets (which are the centre of the flower) of sunflowers form one of the most mesmerizing patterns infused with symmetrical beauty seen amongst cut flowers. For the more mathematically inclined - if you look closely enough, you will see that the florets form interconnecting spirals, where the number of right and left spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers. Each floret is also oriented to the next at roughly the golden angle, constituting a delectable visual feast. Ideal flowers to give to the mathematicians and scientist friends and relatives amongst you!
• These beautiful yellow flowers have also inspired many artwork and literature in the past, the most notable of which may be the series of paintings done by Van Gogh which captured the life of sunflowers at different stages. A random fact - according to some research, Van Gogh's Sunflowers was the painting most preferred by bees!

That's it for now...except for a poem by William Blake for a little sunflower pondering for today.

'Ah Sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done;

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sunflower wishes to go!'