When Alex Babich, 47, stood in his backyard in Fort Wayne, Indiana, craning his neck to look 35 feet into the sky, he wasn’t just staring at a sunflower. He was looking at his roots — and his future legacy. The flower, nicknamed “Clover,” confirmed Wednesday by Guinness World Records as the tallest sunflower ever measured, stretches as high as a telephone pole. Babich, born and raised in Ukraine, immigrated to the U.S. at age 14 in 1991 after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Seven years ago, he started growing sunflowers as a symbol of his love for his home country. “Sunflowers are the national flower of Ukraine, so it’s special to me," he said. Babich's first sunflower was 13 feet tall, then 15, then 19. Quickly, he began asking himself, “How far can we take this?” He collected seeds from his tallest specimens to refine a genetic line, swapped seeds from other giant sunflower growers and formulated a secret plant feed he now calls a “family heirloom.” He planted each seed indoors under grow lights in the early spring before transferring them outside. Then he sketched a blueprint of a sunflower scaffold on a napkin and began building. Babich said the record-breaking flower was the result of “trial and error over years.” “It’s one of my kids,” he said. “You’re out there every day taking care of it.” Babich's 10-year-old son also had an important contribution that earned the towering flower its name. He would climb onto the scaffolding and place four-leaf clovers on the sunflower's leaves, for good luck. “I’m going to die someday, but the stories of this flower will live on,” he said. "My kids will be telling this story to the grandkids.” The sunflower has long been a national symbol representing peace in Ukraine, and since 2022, it has become a symbol of solidarity with the embattled country. In one viral video clip in the war's early days, a Ukrainian woman confronted a Russian soldier, ultimately offering to "put sunflower seeds in your pocket so they grow when you die." In 1996, ministers from the U.S., Russia and Ukraine planted sunflowers at the Pervomaysk missile base to mark the country's nuclear weapon disarmament. In 1986, after the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant that later brought Babich's family to the U.S., scientists planted sunflowers to remove toxins from the soil.