The sunflower provokes a kind of elemental, instinctive response in most humans.By Geoffrey Norman
Photograph by Hubert Schriebl
The Incas, Peter the Great, Vincent Van Gogh ...
they all loved sunflowers. They are big, happy,
easy to grow, and you can eat the seeds or
feed them to the birds. So what's not to love?
There was a bare spot in the meadow where I had burned a brush pile during the winter. It was very early summer and the grass would eventually come back and fill in the gap. By Labor Day, you wouldn't know it had ever been there.
But I had other ideas.
"Let's make it into something special," I said. "For the wedding."
"Like what," my daughter said. Curious. It was her sister's wedding I was talking about. Not hers. Still, she had a stake in how the meadow looked since that is where we planned to hold the ceremony and the reception. But she was capable of some distance.
"I dunno," I said. "I was thinking maybe some sunflowers."
"Sunflowers?"
I'd always planted a few, at the border of the vegetable garden, when she and her sister were little girls. They liked them. Most kids do. Kids find extremes seductive for some reason. It explains, I think, why there are so many giants in children's literature. My daughters liked the four or five giant sunflowers that would get up to ten feet or more by the end of the summer, in a ragged file behind the pumpkins. I usually planted a few seeds that were supposed to produce "mammoth" pumpkins but I never had the kind of success with them that I had with the sunflowers. My gardening was, and remains, a pretty hit-or-miss business. Healthy sunflowers and scraggly pumpkins just about sums it up....
