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MEASURED 3 SEPTEMBER 2025 · 35 FEET 9 INCHES
The flower: Guinness World Records' announcement of 10 September 2025 is plain about it: after ten years, the record for the tallest sunflower had fallen to "a monster bloom grown in the backyard of a family from Fort Wayne, Indiana." The plant, nicknamed Clover, was measured on 3 September 2025 by representatives of the Allen County Department of Weights and Measures and Purdue University Master Gardener graduates at 10.90 metres — 35 feet 9 inches — from the base of its stem to the tip of its highest flower, obliterating the previous mark of 9.17 metres (30 feet 1 inch) set by Hans-Peter Schiffer of Kaarst, Germany, in 2014. The grower, Alex Babich, is a landscape gardener who came to the United States from Ukraine with his family in 1991, after Chernobyl; the sunflower is Ukraine's national flower. He had taken the American record twice before — 7.67 metres in 2022, 7.95 in 2023 — and Clover made him the first American ever to hold the world record. The name came from his ten-year-old son Keenai, who had been placing four-leaf clovers he found in the yard on the plant's leaves for luck. Babich, who hand-out seed packets at festivals, told Guinness he took his example from Fort Wayne's own famous seed-sower: "We live in Fort Wayne, where famous Johnny Appleseed is buried."
Sources: Guinness World Records, "Tallest sunflower — as high as a three-storey house — topples decade-old record," 10 September 2025 (the Fort Wayne backyard, the 3 September 2025 measurement by the Allen County Department of Weights and Measures and Purdue Master Gardeners, 10.90 m / 35 ft 9 in, the Schiffer record of 2014, the Babich American records of 2022 and 2023, the family history and the Clover name).