I said recently in A Glimpse of White that tiny should be a category of flowers. If that’s true, then sunflowers, which to my knowledge are the largest, should have the complementary category. This particular sunflower isn’t especially large, but it dwarfs everything close to it. It’s hard to miss, but it’s also hard to think of as a flower. It seems like it must be more than that. In reality, there are a number of exotic flowers that are larger than sunflowers, but you won’t find them even on an extended walk. They are also heliotropic, which means they follow the sun.

Years ago I walked the dog one Saturday morning at CalPoly. My girlfriend was taking a life drawing class, which gave us about two hours to explore the agricultural parts of the campus. Our dog at the time was the most gentle creature in the world. We took time to look around. We stopped to enjoy the air. At one point we took a loop around a large corral with sheep in it. Every so often I glance at the sheep. They were dead center in the corral, a tight ball, and the sheep in front had their ears out to the sides. They were all perfectly still, which seemed odd to me.

And every time I glanced at them they were the same. The ball of sheep rotated very slowly to keep an eye on us. Or, as I finally figured out, to keep an eye on the dog who, if I let him, would have rubbed up against the sheep and tried to talk with them. But to the sheep, he was a predator. It was only after we got far away and I turned to get one last look that they began to thin out and graze again.

Sheep, I concluded, must be canineotropic. You can tell where the dog is by the position of their ears and the closeness of the pack. If they were larger and less gentle, they might be humanotropic, which would make walking around sheep corrals somewhat dicey.