Sunflowers

A few years ago, an errant sunflower popped up in what was a gravel area in our front yard. This gravel strip had been nothing but an eyesore since we purchased our home – an ill-advised effort by a former homeowner to create a place to park their boat. The gravel is in places nearly 2 feet deep – and it was the ugly, cheap gravel intended for road paving projects. There was nothing attractive about it at all. And I do mean nothing. 

We used that gravel strip as a lumber yard. With so many building projects happening in our backyard – the Shade House, the Green House, and countless raised beds – it was handy to have a well-draining spot to store materials even if it did mean that our home looked a mess at times. 

I weeded the gravel a few times each summer – a thankless job as it was constantly filled with Canada Thistle (Cirsium arvense (L.) Scop.), a thorny, problematic, and invasive weed. 

But one summer, I missed a sunflower that had popped up amongst the thistles. We went on vacation and came back to a lone, towering sunflower. It was Helianthus annuus – a native sunflower for this part of the world, probably a stray seed from a bird or a squirrel. That sunflower plant flowered for months, and the bees loved on it. So I let it stay. It went to seed. Then the birds arrived. And I didn't take it down until the following spring when hundreds of sunflowers sprouted in our gravel patch. 

The world was a hard place that summer. And I decided that weeding out all of those sunflowers was simply too much. So I left them. Steadily they grew taller and taller, and then they started to bloom in late July or early August. 

Swarms of insects arrived to feast. Bees, bumble and native and honey, flies and wasps. I sat in my car in the driveway every morning watching the chaotic aerial ballet as they bumbled and flitted and buzzed between blooms, the entire air humming. 

And then the birds arrived by the flock. And the air was filled with birdsong as they feasted on the seeds and insects, too. 

One day, my husband looked outside, and a hawk was perched on our car watching the sunflower patch – surely hunting one of the mice or rabbits or other small creatures who scurried along the ground, gathering dropped seeds courtesy of the birds above. Occasionally, a stalk would be knocked over – probably the nocturnal work of a racoon or the early-morning wrestling of a squirrel. But for the most part, the sunflowers thrived, a thick patch of sunshine.

We spent hours and hours watching the activity in the sunflower garden. It was magical, honestly. And it was a remarkable illustration of what wildlife gardening can be – providing native plants for wildlife and creating a habitat rather than a well-groomed garden. 

Even our neighbors didn't seem to mind the overgrown nature of the sunflowers. They often stopped to chat when out walking and over the months I heard, "I love your sunflowers!" over and over again. 

I have since reclaimed the sunflower garden. It is the site of the much more restrained Potager Garden. But that does not mean I don't have sunflowers. I have grown a wide range of different types – scattered throughout my garden including a large, self-seeded stand of them as part of the Wildlife Garden. And they are one of the cheeriest parts of summer.