One man’s love affair with summer’s essential flower
By Ross Howell Jr.
Last summer a neighbor got me thinking about sunflowers, and I put in my first seeds ever.
He was notorious for planting sunflowers near street signs, by sidewalks, or next to abandoned brick piles. He planted anywhere he discovered a patch of open ground, sometimes surreptitiously in the dead of night, earning the nickname the “Sunflower Bandit.”
My neighbor prefers to think of himself as “Johnny Sunflower Seed,” playing on the name of our American hero of childhood lore. And I’d say he’s earned the right. Scion of an old North Carolina family whose ancestors include a legend in the hunt for Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution, a state senator, and a respected judge, he has served in the U.S. Navy, navigated a sailboat across the Gulf of Mexico, earned a commercial pilot’s license, and was once homeless, while struggling with addiction. Now, he tends brick-edged flower beds he’s fashioned with owners’ permission in front of businesses and apartments along a nearby street.
He says his mother, a Louisiana girl, was the person who first got him interested in sunflowers.
“There were beds along a stone walkway at our house,” he recalls. “And one spring, I think I was about 14, my mother brought me these seed packets. She said if I planted them along the walkway, they’d grow into enormous flowers.” His face brightens as he recounts the event. “Well, I planted those seeds, and I’ll bet I checked them every half hour to see if they’d sprouted. I watered and watered. And here grew these giant plants, eight, nine feet tall, with big yellow flowers, and everybody commented on how beautiful they were.” He smiled.
“When you’re a kid, things like that make an impression on you. Sunflowers are spiritual, you know?” he says. “They reach toward the sun, like they’re reaching to God, and they turn their faces, following the sun, like they’re following God.”
I remembered, listening, that it was my mother who first got me interested in sunflowers, too. She favored the giant ones, saving their seeds for the winter feeder by her window — cardinals, chickadees, titmice and evening grosbeaks sampling the buffet as big snowflakes fell, dusting their feathers. Her sunflowers grew ten, even twelve feet tall, with seed heads so broad it seemed miraculous the plants could support them.
“Add soil as they grow,” my neighbor suggests. “Say you add six inches of topsoil? That root is going to spread another ten inches.”
He favors the tall, broad-shouldered yellow sunflowers. I go for the modest sizes myself, heights of five, six feet, because I like to cut flowers for my wife, Mary Leigh. This year I planted two varieties of yellow, and a red. The red sunflowers have faces of red, orange and ocher. They’re more finicky than the yellow, and want more care. The reds don’t stand the heat as well as the yellows, either, even if carefully watered. Still, I like working with them, and maybe I’ll get better at understanding their needs.
But give the big yellow sunflowers a little water and plenty of soil, and they can take pretty much anything old Mr. Sol can beam down. And their stalks support burdens that sometimes seem impossible.
In late summer they stand tall and regal, resilient and undaunted, among flowers frumpy and withered by circumstance. That’s what I like about them.
I bet that’s what my neighbor likes, too. PS
Ross Howell Jr. is catching up on his reading, starting a new novel, and anxious to hear from readers about favorite fall or winterplants, shrubs and trees.
