Sun Flowers

Another floral experience I was involved with was sunflowers. I was fascinated by how quickly they grew, how interesting the head pattern was and how when you husked the seeds from the flower head each seed seemed to have a bar code on it and each seed was different.

I lived in a house with a very small yard at the time. I grew about ten sunflower plants a year, but when you buy seeds you usually get a package of thirty seeds. So what do you do with the left over seeds?

I would go for a ride on my bike and plant them. I’d just sneak one seed into a place you wouldn’t ever expect to see a giant sun flower growing. Sometimes it was on the road side. Sometimes it was in a planter box at the library, or near the gate shack at a big industrial complex.

I would plant in May and by August my efforts paid off. Oddly I never heard mention or even a question about where all the sun flowers suddenly came from. People in that town would notice a garage sale sign that had been left up too long and report it to the authorities, however they never seemed to notice the random beauty of a sun flower that just popped up out of no where.