Sunflowers

Last year, moving patio furniture around, I found a scattered pile of birdseed beneath a storage chest, where an opossum had ripped into a bag I left out. 

I swept the dregs off the edge of the patio and forgot about it. 

Some point last fall I noticed some oddly thick weeds springing up at the edge of the pavement. Took a closer look, and realized they were as-yet non-blooming sunflowers, sprung from those scattered seeds, straight from the thick sod. 

I’ve only ever tried to grow sunflowers once, and only because someone gave me a pack of seeds. They didn’t make it, and…I wasn’t cut up. 

The truth is, they’ve never been a favorite flower. They’re so big, and ostentatiously sturdy, somehow, in a way that clashes with my English-garden-aesthetic fondness for floral delicates. And the color…all I can think of is Orwen, offering a magic potion you can sprinkle on daffodils to take away that “bilious yellow”.

I like pansies and petunias, sweet peas and delphinium and all the other frilly pinks and purples that wilt in our heat after April. Yellow, if I choose it at all, is something to add to the mix for contrast. 

So seeing these uninvited guests popping up in a neglected corner too close to the house to mow over gave me a twinge of irony. But I never discourage volunteer plantings. Any not-weed brave enough to germinate in the middle of a St Augustine lawn is worth granting it its chance, for sheer grit. 

So they stayed. The flowers bloomed, yellow heads bobbing cheerfully before folding themselves away. I smiled over them, and again, forgot about it. 

Fast forward. A weird winter, with multiple record-breaking freezes that killed my tropical heat-loving stuff. Puttering around in March, I noticed a cluster of new sunflower stems coming up where the former ones had been. And, further away—further, I thought, than I had swept any of those seeds—two more stems, double the height of the others. 

I waited. Both these newcomers grew to be four feet tall. One grew the standard large single bloom. The other budded out multiples and seemed to add more buds daily, branching out behind each “main” flower until its stems drooped with their own weight. 

That was last week. Now the original cluster is blooming. The first flowers are heavy seed-heads, preparing to drop another crop. I am unexpectedly delighted by them, by the thought of these cheerful, relentlessly sunny giants continuously reseeding themselves all along this portion of my yard, until the whole narrow passage between my wall and my fence is nothing but a yellow jungle. A bilious, bouncing yellow sea. Bring it on.

This is the part where I would, previously, have tied in some kind of pretentious moral about unexpected beauty and blessings where we didn’t ask for them, and hearts changing toward previously-unappreciated things. Maybe that’s all in here, somewhere, or maybe I’m just enjoying watching the blooming of things i didn’t have to plant or nurture or labor over and…oh. 

Yep. That’s definitely it. 

And it’s enough.