A Sunflower’s Story
To me, the most endearing of human tendencies is how we anthropomorphize with reckless abandon. It’s not hard to find examples of this behavior. Anyone who has ever owned a pet is guilty of this, as although domesticated animals are exceptional at interacting with us, there is a vast gulf of understanding at play. This is not to discount the emotional intelligence of dogs or cats, but assigning human intent, characteristics, and emotions to most animals seems less fruitful than seeking to understand other animals in their own terms.
For our fellow mammals, I can quite understand the inclination to anthropomorphize. After all, the line between us and our mammal relatives in the grand scheme of things is not as large as we sometimes would like to pretend. For as unique as we are as humans, there are fundamental aspects we share with these animals that I no doubt believe we can recognize.
It’s when we talk about plants that the whole tendency gets a little more interesting. If there exists a gulf of understanding between us and the domesticated animals we have been shaping for generations, there is quite a chasm between us and plants. I remember in elementary school, I had a friend passionately argue that plants were in fact not alive at all, since they did not move, have eyes, or exhibit any other animal traits. If we’re misreading signals from our pets all the time, we probably don’t understand half of the signals a plant would send out on the regular. Just ask anyone who has ever tried to keep one alive about how confusing it can be to distinguish between signs of overwatering and underwatering.
And yet, you can definitely find people who will call a plant “a little guy” or refer to a plant being in ideal conditions as being “happy.” I have done this before without shame, and I will continue to do so. I understand that “happy” as I know it is a rather poor label for comprehending what is going on with the plant, but I also don’t care.
I cannot promise that the sunflower I grew last year was “happy” by any means. In fact, I’d wager it was more likely to be the opposite if anything. As gardeners, we try to chase the ideal conditions for the plants or seeds we are putting into the ground, or at least, we should be doing so. How often that comes true, I cannot say for sure, but I would assure most people would at the least search up the best times to plant something before committing seeds to the dirt. After spending most of the late spring and early summer setting the foundations of my native California garden, I turned my attention to a patch of dirt I intended on turning into a wildflower patch in the near future.
I picked up a pack of sunflower seeds on a whim at Lowes while out on a different errand, and decided to give it a shot, even if it was late August. Growing sunflowers in late summer, especially a Southern California one, is far from impossible, although you would probably prefer spring as a starting point. I put a number of seeds into the ground, gave minimal water since we were still under drought conditions, and hoped for the best.
By early September, I had a little sunflower seedling. It was the first to germinate, and I was beyond delighted to see it come up out of the ground. There is something comical about how sunflowers come up, wearing the cap of their seed hulls over their first leaves. I’m not the type of person to name my plants, although I have absolutely no judgment if you do, but I did take a picture just to commemorate the occasion. Although I had grown things from seed before, this was the first member of the new native garden to not have been a perennial purchased elsewhere, and I felt that it was worth documenting the story no matter how it turned out.
Not too long after the seedling emerged from the ground, the Los Angeles area was hit by an absolutely brutal stretch of weather. Temperatures were over 100 degrees for a week, and a disgusting humidity set into the southland. Nothing can quite humble you like weather can, and although we have many different means of combating the extremes, there is no hiding from just how oppressive the heat can be. Air conditioners and whatever cooling methods you want to deploy are not going to solve the problem, just make it more bearable. All you can do is wait it out, and hope that you won’t lose it while trying to sleep in night time temperatures that barely dip below 80 degrees.
And through it all, there was the sunflower sprout, braving the heat. I understand that plants can take the heat and sun much better than we can, but it’s hard to not feel something looking out at the young seedling, just a couple of weeks old, staring down the most unpleasant part of our climate. Every part of me understands that the plant cannot feel in the same way we do, but I felt for it. It was in these conditions because I had chosen to plant it when I did, and I could not help but feel a bit of responsibility.
For all my worries, it did not wilt from the heat, but for its strength, it was rewarded by a rare event for Los Angeles: a hurricane. Now, we were not hit by a hurricane head on, as the system stayed off shore, but it did bring some of the strongest winds in recent memory, coupled with rains and continued heat. As the gusts battered my perennials, who were also relatively young, I assumed that by the end of the storm, my seedling would finally succumb to the weather.
When the winds died down and the clouds cleared, I walked out to see that the sunflower had survived.
I was convinced at this point that the sunflower’s story was going to be special. It had survived quite a bit already, even at its young age, and I was determined to see it through to its full bloom. For the next month, I watched as it grew taller and taller, making slow but steady progress. I continued work with the rest of the garden, trying to add in more native perennials as the weather grew cooler, while the sunflower was in the background. There was a special delight to watching it grow, maybe because to me, it felt like it was already on borrowed time. Even as it was starting to visibly work on growing its flowers in late October, I was still reminded of the little seedling that survived those September gusts. The sunflower’s bloom felt anything but inevitable, and after everything that it had endured, I wanted so badly for it to reach that stage.
By early November, it was starting to show some yellow petals peeking out from under the green. It was a sign that we were nearing the climax of its story. After weeks of slow development, each passing day now brought more dramatic and visible changes. The last petals to unfold seemed to take the longest, testing my patience for just a little longer. This was the moment that I had been waiting for since I had put the seed in the ground, when the sunflower would arrive in all its beauty.
And it did not disappoint.
It was the moment, it was the main event of the garden. Even as my perennial plants in the garden were healthy and rounded into form, there was no question where any visitor’s attention would go. The sunflower was my crown jewel, cemented in its status by the journey it had been on to arrive at this point. It was not as large as I had imagined it would be, although at that point it was still larger than anything in that wildflower bed would be, but it was there and alive, when I had assumed it would not even make it past its first month.
It had about two weeks of glory before the first petals started to droop, and the vibrant yellow began to fade. For most of November, the sunflower was still a major part of the garden, and retained much of its beauty even if it had seen better days.
And then December came, and the petals had started to wilt. The head had become too heavy for the stalk to support, and the sunflower had adopted a permanent lean. It had entered its twilight years, and I’m sure many would have seen it fit to chop it down at this point. I elected to see its story through, just to see what would happen. Much attention is given to the early days, the buildup to the climax, and those glorious moments themselves, for just about anything. The decline is much harder to stomach, but it is by no means any less beautiful.
For almost all of December and January, the sunflower was wilting, barely strong enough to not completely flop over. The perennials of the garden were starting to really take off, and I found myself preoccupied and fascinated with them most days. However, in the background, the sunflower was still there, occupying the spot that it had so earned through its resilience. For what amounted to a large part of its story in terms of time, these twilight months were the quietest. California received more rain in the winter of 2022–2023 than we had in a very long time. Having already bloomed, this sunflower was in no position to take advantage of all that rain, the same conditions that allowed for such dramatic growth in the rest of the garden. I even had more sunflowers sprout up around the area from the original packet of seeds I laid down.
The harshness of this timing is not lost on me. This sunflower began life in terrible conditions and weathered them all only to see ideal ones at the very end, when they would mean nothing.
But, of course, the sunflower doesn’t care. The sunflower does not perceive any of this, and does not have an opinion on the conditions that it grew in. It made it to maturity, and did its biological duty. Whatever story I’m seeing here was not written by the sunflower itself, but is something I saw and thought up throughout the course of these months. I know all this, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t feel a compulsion to assign emotions to the sunflower.
It is human, deeply so, to see the divine and the person in all manner of life. Ultimately, to anthropomorphize is to see ourselves in our surroundings, a reflection for the soul. It is how we process the world around us, through our own unique lens. It is difficult for me to not see life as I know it, in human terms, play out in front of me when I see the sunflower grow, and I am reminded of what awaits me as I continue to see my own years go by. We cannot choose the conditions that we are born into, and the storms that we pass into are so often on courses we cannot alter. The best we can do is to find our own ways forward, for whatever blooms await us, for however long. And if we are so fortunate, may we enjoy our own twilight years, no matter how bittersweet they can be.
I finally cut the sunflower down around mid February. There was nothing green left of the plant, and the story that had started back in August had come to an end. I kept the stalk as a reminder of what had lived, and I committed the rest to the soil of a new bed in the garden to return to the earth.
Surrounding the sunflower’s spot now are the wildflowers that I had planned on planting in that bed from the beginning. There are also new sunflowers all around the garden that I planted during the winter rains, and hopefully soon the entire place will be awash in yellow. There is even one growing near where the original one once stood, next to what remains of the root crown and base of the stalk.
But none of them will carry the same kind of story that my sunflower had. Any emotions or thoughts attached to them are residuals of what was written for the first sunflower, and every bloom from here on out will be compared to those few weeks in November that made the pains of September worthwhile .
Happy Earth Day week! I apologize for the long hiatus in between this post and the last. I have been busy both with my job and other writing projects. However, I have been gardening throughout it all, and I do have some great progress to share eventually. I will try to update where I can, but I hope that you are all out there gardening and have been enjoying this beautiful spring.
