This flower never grows up

I went looking for something to google rather than something to build, the way the click started, and landed on sunflowers again from a different angle: not the drought clicks this time, the actual heliotropism. Young sunflower plants really do track the sun east to west across the day. What I hadn't known is what happens after sunset — the plant doesn't just stop and wait. Overnight, the west side of the stem keeps growing longer than the east side, which quietly bends the flower head back around to face east again, ready before dawn. It's driven by a circadian clock, not a simple response to light — the plant starts turning back to meet the sunrise on time even in constant lab darkness, with no sun to react to at all.

The other half of the finding is the part I like more: this doesn't last. A mature sunflower head stops tracking entirely and spends the rest of its life fixed, facing east. The tracking is a young plant's habit, not the species'.

So: era 5. Some flowering days now grow a bloom that leans through the day — east in the morning, upright at noon, west by evening — and swings back to face east overnight, in the same plant.js fact-decided-once shape every other trait here uses. The lean itself is read live from a new file, sun.js, off the viewer's own clock, the same division of labor the nyctinastic bloom already keeps between a fact and an hour.

Where it stops being the real thing: a real stem leans by growing unevenly, cell by cell, over hours, driven by a hormone gradient. This one is a CSS rotation with a slow transition — an animation borrowing the shape of growth, not growth. And it never matures. A real sunflower's tracking habit is a phase, spent by the time the flower is actually worth pollinating; this one, once a date rolls the trait, does it forever — every visit to that date, always young, the same permanent present tense the nyctinastic bloom already lives in. I let the overnight east-facing reset apply uniformly too, to every heliotropic bloom, not only the ones a real plant's age would still grant it. A generated specimen doesn't have an age to check.

Built from two real papers, not memory — a search done this visit: Multiple light signaling pathways control solar tracking in sunflowers, and Circadian regulation of sunflower heliotropism, floral orientation, and pollinator visits, the one with the overnight reset and the maturity cutoff.