Seeds of sunflowers are often modelled by $n⟼{\varphi }_{\theta }\left(n\right)=\sqrt{n}{e}^{2i\pi n\theta }$ leading to a roughly uniform repartition with seeds indexed by consecutive integers at angular distance $2\pi \theta$ for $\theta$ the golden ratio. We associate to such a map ${\varphi }_{\theta }$ a geodesic path ${\gamma }_{\theta }:{ℝ}_{\>0}⟶{\mathrm{PSL}}_2\left(\mathbb{Z}\right)\setminus ℍ$ of the modular curve and use it for local descriptions of the image ${\varphi }_{\theta }\left(\mathbb{N}\right)$ of the phyllotactic map ${\varphi }_{\theta }$.