My Love-Hate Affair

I have a sick obsession with sunflowers...they disgust me and yet...I just can't stay away.

When I was a teenager searching for identity I went through a phase where I identified as a sunflower. I had just seen my first bottle of Estee Lauder Sunflowers perfume, probably in a Walmart, considering the availability of department stores to my non-driving self growing up in California's rural central coast, and I was hooked. It smelled like nothing I'd ever experienced before, sort of warm and salty and sweet, evoking a perfect summer's day eating buttered sweet corn on the cob, like the coconut-tropical sun oil so iconic to the 90s mixed with the fine salty sweat that springs from laying contentedly in the sun. The bright, cheerful yellow packaging pleased and soothed my eye and seemed perfectly, entirely right with the world. I thought about sunflowers a lot, how they turned their dancing heads to the sun and lifted their faces in smiling worship. There was a serenity there that I sought and a beauty, so I took to sitting in sunny spots wherever I could find them, my legs curled under me and my face lifted to the sun, soaking in the warmth, experiencing rare moments of absolute presence.

I didn't actually write this book. My exploits as a half-teenaged girl, half-sun worshipping flower became the stuff of legend.

Sunflowers were my summer romance when I was a teenager. My adult sunflower garden is, as all faerie tales must be, a little more mired in the mundane.

I first planted sunflowers in my garden after a trip to the beautiful Carlsbad flower fields. There as part of a sustainability class we potted tiny sunflower seeds, a kindergarten primer on the joy of growing from seed. Sunflowers come up quick and grow like gangbusters and this little pot of seeds was no exception, pushing up through the soil in less than a week and spreading out strong leaves from its sturdy little stalk. Inspired, I grabbed a packet of random sunflower seeds from the racks at my nursery and carelessly threw them out in an empty patch of bare soil I'd just cultivated. They exploded out of the soil like the fireworks they so resemble, quickly growing to five feet high and unfurling their goldenrod petals like a crown around chocolate-brown centers bursting with seeds. Just like when I was a girl, they thrilled me with their size and their brilliance and their cheerful presence. They became the first place I brought people on my little garden tours.

Hello, my prince.

"Aren't they beautiful?" I gushed to my brother-in-law, inhaling the ambrosial scent of the tomato leaves, hot in the sun, and soaking in the same warmth my flowers were industriously converting into selenium-rich seeds.

"Beautiful," he agreed. "Hope you get some of the seeds. I planted those all over the ranch last year and the birds got every last seed before I could harvest a single one."

What now?

I hadn't thought about the birds. Honestly I hadn't really thought about the seeds, I'd just liked the thought of having sunflowers but suddenly I was determined that no wretched little bastard birds were going to steal my freaking sunflower seeds. I had no idea how to harvest the seeds but if birds could do it I felt sure it couldn't be that hard...like anything about urban farming, how hard could it be?

Sure, professor. Tell me again about the coconut powered tractor slash television slash nuclear reactor we're building. HOW HARD COULD IT BE. 

 A quick web search told me I'd have to wait until the seeds ripened on the heads and the heads dried up enough to easily release the seeds. I went out to my sunflowers. A few of them had nice stripey seeds but they weren't releasing the seeds. A brightly colored yellow finch flew down while I was checking and malevolently watched me from my fence, taunting me with its grinning, tweeting song, a horrible inversion of my Snow White fantasies where the sweetly singing bird companion was actually biding its time to inflict its dark will upon me.

We want. THOSE SEEDS.

Okay, no problem. I'd have to keep the sunflowers on the heads for a few more days, and just...keep the birds away somehow. I draped the flower patch with black bird netting; now my flowers looked like they were getting reading for a Victorian funeral, their cheerful petals were crushed, but at least the seeds were safe. It was just for a few more days. Weeks. Whatever. The leaves, huge and lushly green one day, started browning and dying on the stalk as the seeds ripened, but refused to fall. They hung on the stalks like wrinkled bats dangling in clusters. The petals fell until nothing was left but the seed center, that I'd once idealistically compared to chocolate, to velvet, to the warmth of summer garden soil--now just ugly, dried, and dead. With mounting concern I ran my fingers over the seed heads daily, checking to see if they'd release the seeds. The flowers steadily decayed, no more handsome dancing princes but haggard, hideous crones and still those seed heads refused to give up their bounty.

The birds watched. And waited.

Fear us. We come.

I finally got to the point where I couldn't stand the daily suspense and cut down some of the heads that were mostly ripened as a gardener friend suggested. I bagged the heads in brown grocery bags so the air could still circulate and the heads wouldn't mold while they dried out, and weeks later, the heat in my garage had finally finished drying them to the point that I could shake the heads into the bags and get my seeds.

Once I had the seeds I completely forgot about all the stress of waiting for the seeds to ripen and how ugly the stalks became and the daily stalking by seed-seeking pterodactyls and planted more. 

Damn you, sunflowers. 

This year I added to the seeds I'd propagated from last year to plant sunflowers from The Great Sunflower Project, an organization dedicated to "identifying where pollinators need help, and helping!" I planted "Birds and Bees sunflowers", an heirloom variety with extra pollen for increasingly endangered pollinators like honey bees (and, uncomfortably, for my nemesis, the backyard vultures. Finches. Whatever) and rich, super oily kernels with soft shells. Ignoring completely how I'd hated how ugly the sunflowers got in the backyard I planted them in a raised bed in the front yard; I decided if I planted them thickly they'd support each other's stems and stay looking nice for longer. I put down a thick layer of fresh compost and chicken manure and planted the seeds by the handfuls.

What came up were enormous, gargantuan, monstrous sunflowers. "Birds and Bees" were supposed to grow between 6-8'; the stalks shot up to 8' and kept on going, some reaching 9 and 10 feet. The stalks were thick, several inches in diameter, and the heads were 8" across. They blossomed in extravagant yellow, unfurling their petals like a lady shyly spreading her skirts, first one then the others in quick succession, a procession of blithe and bright-eyed dancers, buoyant in the sun. Every morning I'd find honeybees crawling all over the huge heads, three or four per flower, rare in these bee-starved times. I also saw literal flocks of finches, sparrows and songbirds flying out of the sunflowers every time I went out to water, but I didn't want to cover the heads with unsightly bird netting since they were in the front yard unless I absolutely had to. I tried to tell myself the birds wouldn't get everything and if it started to look like we were losing too many seeds I'd cut the heads like before. The stalks started to die back and look terrible again and since they were ten feet high there was extra room for them to look completely horrible, the most enormous weeds in a giant's abandoned lot. I worried what the neighbors thought. 

"At least we're not the worst yard in the neighborhood," my neighbor the hoarder told me brightly while walking his one-eyed dog. The ancient cocker spaniel leaked goo from her one good eye as they walked back to the dead yard next to the open garage filled to the top with boxes and precariously piled assorted cobwebby junk. 

I can't fault his observations.

Still, I want those seeds. Seed packets are $3 for a handful of seeds, a fraction of what even one seed head can produce. At the end of each sunflower season we have plenty to eat (here's a recipe for roasting salted seeds) and to share with the chickens for feed, with tons left over for replanting. So it's a daily struggle between wanting to cut them all down to keep the yard from looking so gross, and just giving in to absolute chaos and netting and brown bagging the heads right on the stalk. I've taken to pulling the hanging-bat dead leaves off the stems to reduce the amount of brown and mulching them into the beds and trying to just keep the flowers looking somewhat tidy, but the seeds stubbornly remain pure, unripened white even as the stalks deteriorate daily. Every morning I think, well, at least the flowers provided a ton of pollen to sustain the declining honeybee population, maybe that's enough. Maybe I should just take them down today.

Except one of the seed heads turned stripey. I ran my finger over the seed head and the seeds fell gently into my palm, perfectly formed, ready to eat. I cracked one open with my teeth and ate it right there, and threw a handful to my backyard hens. They descended upon the seeds and gobbled them up like gumdrops. I noticed there were some little sunflowers sprouting at the base of the huge stalks, opening their baby yellow cheeks to the sun filtering through the amazon forest of legs.

Hmm. Maybe the neighbors can wait.