So, this is our Long Lake garden. No, our Long Lake garden is mostly hostas and a few other low maintenance perennials.  This is the sunflower field of a farmer on M-33 between Fairview and Comins–about 30 miles from the cottage.  Helianthus Annus.  When their buds are flowering, sunflowers  face east at sunrise and then follow the sun from east to west while the day progresses.  They have motor cells in their stalk, just below the head, that allow them to be heliotrophic.  If you think about it too much, or pass by their fields at different times of the day while they are all moving in unison, it’s a bit “Day of the Triffids” creepy.   One cool talent? Sunflowers can extract bad stuff from the soil, like lead, arsenic and uranium. (Not that there’s much of  that, hopefully, in the soil around M-33).  Sunflowers were planted around Chernobyl after the nuclear power plant disaster as part of the restoration effort. Hopefully, nobody made sunflower oil out of those.