A sunflower grown by a Fort Wayne, Indiana man - a “competitive gardener” - has set a new world record.
The sunflower grown by Alex Babich is named Clover.
“My son, he started picking four-leaf clovers and he started putting them on top of the plant, the leaves, so we named this plant Clover,” he said.
And, at 35-feet, 9 inches, it topped the previous record, set in Germany, by 5-feet, 8-inches.
“Now, Clover is world champion,” he said. “Clover has beaten the Guinness world record, the famous German record that was set at 30 feet and 1 inch 11 years ago.”
Babich shot video from a 40-foot bucket lift as the official measurement was made.
He said, “Alright Clover, it’s go time.”
Master gardeners were witnesses. Someone from Guinness joined on Zoom while about 50 people looked on.
He erected a wooden structure around the plant that has grown over time, along with the sunflower, which is tied to the structure at various points.
He’s been growing sunflowers for seven years and has set other records along the way.
Early this season, he said, his wife told him he could set a new world record.
“She said, ‘Alex, I’m dead serious, I’m going to pray about this, so we can take the year off from competitive growing so we can go camping more next year,’ and I gave he my word, I said, ‘okay, if I smash the world record, that’s fine.’”
“Would you say you’re obsessed with gardening?” he was asked.
“Yes,” he said. “it started as a hobby and it turned into a passion and now obsession is probably the right word to describe it,” he said with a laugh.
He has a lot of followers among social media gardening pages.
He says, “that’s pretty cool.”
Babich is from Ukraine.
The national flower of Ukraine is the sunflower.
He emigrated in 1991 to escape the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, he said.
It took about 5 years to get approval.
Now, he’s the first American to hold the world record.
Other record-holders, he said, were from Germany or the Netherlands.