Attack of the giant sunflower

I had a hunch that if I grew sunflowers in a fenced enclosure inside the chicken run they’d get big, since that’s the most fertile part of my backyard. Tonight I measured the tallest at 10 feet, 8 inches (3.25 meters). It’s stout, too, I feel like I could almost climb it. Impressive!

Yeah, but how impressive? And, even more interesting to me, how can we find data to help answer the question? Perhaps with a sequence of searches like so:

“1-foot sunflower”

“2-foot sunflower”

…etc…

“26-foot sunflower”

“27-foot sunflower”

These are parallel searches of Google and Bing for “[1..27]-foot sunflower”. Here are the resulting counts, with Bing scaled up by a factor of 100 to make the trends comparable:

So, maybe my near-11-footer isn’t so special after all. This method of finding out is interesting, though. It seems incredibly naive. If you try those queries you’ll find all sorts of stuff that isn’t relevant to what I mean by an n-foot sunflower. But if the amount of irrelevance is constant across the range, it factors out, right? And the two independent search engines make this a controlled experiment.

I wonder how well this proxy for sunflower height distribution correlates with the actual distribution. Of course there are a million other questions you could try to answer this way. It’d be easy to make a web app to automate this method. I lazily hope somebody already has, or will, so I don’t have to.

PS: My sunflowers are actually a second crop. The first one had a crazy head start, because we had freaky warm weather in February. But then in early April, when they were already 3 feet high, the chickens broke into the enclosure and demolished them. What lofty heights could my sunflowers have reached this summer? We’ll never know.

PPS: Here’s the data:

1,2,0
2,994,10
3,8,4
4,10,4
5,9,4
6,3270,37
7,74,11
8,135,12
9,176,11
10,1690,39
11,75,9
12,472,37
13,82,12
14,220,8
15,54,9
16,9,4
17,2,1
18,55,4
19,6,2
20,119,8
21,0,0
22,2,0
23,0,0
24,8,3
25,891,2
26,3,2
27,0,0