Back in the spring we planted four sunflower seeds in a pot, as the seeds began to shoot and pop up above the soil my hubby spilt them up and gave one plant to the neighbour, one to my parents then kept two.

Well, whilst ours have grown to be standing over twelve feet tall they are spindly and have tiny blooms, my parents and our neighbours have bloomed spectacularly. Whilst the neighbours have a number of blooms on theirs it is indeed my parents that has grown and grown, in fact at one point my dad thought it was more like the stalk in the famous story ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ such was it’s growing spurt.

It isn’t however just the height of it, the leaves measure over a foot wide (each one of them) and the sunflower itself is 13 inches wide! I have never seen one grow quite like this one.

At the start however I thought it was, like ours going nowhere; it took ages to even stand above the flowers we had planted in a pot next to it. Then patience paid off and everyday it seemed to grow a little more.

Now I am sure that there are a lot of readers who can boost to have grown a sunflower such as this one however it is the joy that it has bought to those who have watched it that has made it just a teeny bit special.

Every day we would watch it, wondering just how big it was going to be as it reached further up, once the bud had come on the top we would wait patiently for it to open to ascertain just how big the flower would be on what had become an enormous and thick stalk; when it reached the span it did, we were all in awe.

Now you may think this is just a sweet tale of a sunflower yet hidden within is a story of the four seeds that all started life the same, just as we all do as babies. It is however what happens next that helps us develop and reach the heights we are destined to do.

The two flowers we kept were left in the pot, the two we gave away (and have grown the most) were planted in the ground, they were all treated with the same amount of TLC yet all grew to produce very different flowers. On searching deeper into why this had happened we discovered that the seeds were all different in the packet they come from, just as babies all are born to different parents. To me this shows us that while initially we are all similar as we grow it is where we are planted (where we live), what and who are we surrounded by, what the conditions are around us (some of these plants had more sun than others) and what we carry in our genes that makes us individual.

So, this sunflower acts as a reminder to not compare yourself with others, always stand tall and everyday just be who you were born to be.