A Sunflower Anomaly

My daughter, Heather, planted a half dozen sunflowers in front of the steps that lead to the front door of our house. They've just started to bloom and are a beautiful and yet imposing greeting as you walk towards my doorway. I don't know much about sunflowers, in fact, I don't know much about anything that is green and sprouts from the ground. I don't even water the lawn for fear it might grow. I even run around the yard yelling, "Die!" at the top of my lungs. After all, a growing lawn needs mowing and who has time for that?

But seriously, I am enjoying the sunflowers. And like everything else around here and in my life, one of them is a bit odd. As far as my understanding about sunflowers goes, they are a rather tall, single green-stalked plant with a beautiful golden flower on top. There are some variations of colors and sizes but the key was a single stalk with a single flower. So why does one of the sunflowers have around a dozen buds on it?

I checked with my official source, Wikipedia, and nowhere does it mention that sunflowers have multiple blooms. I googled sunflowers and checked verious websites, but to no avail. It seems that no one has ever seen or taken a picture of a multiple bloom sunflower. I was talking with Betty tonight and I told her about the unusual flower. As far as she knows, she's never heard of a sunflower with more than one bloom. I told her that I decided that it must be an anomaly.

That got a big chuckle out of Betty. "Throwing big words at me, are you?" she asked quite amused with herself. Even though anomaly is not a word I use often, I didn't think it was THAT big of a word. But before I could defend myself or tell her I had to look it up in the dictionary to make sure I was using and spelling it correctly, Betty continued, "But don't you see that anomaly is the perfect word here. It accurately describes your flower!" I sighed and just said, "Yea, it's unusual."

If anyone out there knows anything about sunflowers, please clue me in as to whether or not this mutliple-budded sunflower is an anomaly or simply just unusual. Or maybe it's a mutation, like a two-headed snake or someone with an extra toe. But isn't a mutation an anomaly? Does being a mutation or an anomaly automatically mean it's unusual? I just don't know. Where's Betty when you need her?