Ah! Sunflowers

By Holly Wren Spaulding
Sun contributor
For gardeners and farmers, summer is partially understood in terms of what is coming ripe at what time, so early on there are sugar snap peas and eventually fresh garlic, and eventually tomatoes and squash and soon there will be melons. We know where we are in the season based on what is coming ripe in the fields. At this time of year I’m mainly paying attention to the flowers, which I helped to transplant into the ground last spring. What began as long rows of tender seedlings has exploded into profusions of color and fragrance.
For flower growers, summer starts with peonies and lilies and progresses with zinnias and snapdragons. By early August, we begin to see the first sunflowers unfurling their bright petals in the jungles of stalks and rustling where they have been steadily reaching toward the sky for months.

These are by far the most beloved of the flowers we grow for sale and yet their arrival is a moody event for many of us on the farm. Their appearance carries with it the realization that we are ever so gradually leaning toward fall, and we begin to be aware that summer is winding down and we lament that the number of beach days is on a decline rather than an increase.
In a small act of defiance, we don’t cut the first flush of sunflowers as if to spare anyone else noticing that the days are getting a little shorter and the light is bending differently across the fields. In early August, we reason that other people—those who buy flowers—will be similarly ambivalent about the appearance of these emblems of late summer, and so we spare them for a week or so, focusing on a baudy palette of mixed flowers.
But now, my fellow flower girls and I are in the sunflower patch for several hours a day, looking each bloom in the face before we cut and gather what we find into tall buckets to take to market. The bees are in there with us, buzzing away, and increasingly zealous. Our afternoons pass to the hum of thousands of pollinators who dive head first into the flowers, sometimes sticking in the sweet center where some of them will die decadently.
A customer at Hansen’s Supermarket in Suttons Bay was buying sunflowers recently and asked why some of the blooms face straight up toward the sky, while others face to the side or even bend a little in odd directions. She wanted to know if they track the sun as it travels across the sky. Jenny Tutlis, on whose farm I work, explained that sunflowers we are cutting always face the rising sun. The question may come from the fact that young sunflowers in the budding phase exhibit heliotropism, which is to say, they follow the sun throughout the day. As they mature, those motor cells in the flexible segment of the stem just below the bloom, firm up and no longer move from east to west as the sun does.
Our own awareness of what is happening up above is shifting around right now. After the spectacular Perseid showers on the weekend of August 12th, I sense a shift in the cosmos, as if those meteors were relics of summer, falling, falling away into the lakes whose surfaces have become choppier. Now the sun slants somewhat starkly and the winds have kicked up the way they do every year at this time, preparing the waters for surfers and cooling off the land temperatures. Indeed, summer is drawing to a close.
Lately I’ve been revisiting Georgia O’Keefe’s life and art. While reading about her fascination with painting large portraits of flowers, I came across a remark she made in 1976 about this practice of looking closely at subjects so often beneath the notice of others. She said, “A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower — the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it — maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking — or give it to someone to please them. Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small. So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they may be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I make of flowers.”
I often bring home leftover flowers from the farm and have them around the house, brightening up the dark corners and sweetening up every room. I like to give them away as well and it seems a tremendous joy to bestow upon someone; a simple gesture that always elicits pleasure. Even the slightly bedraggled zinnias or sunflowers missing a petal or two are sure to bring pure happiness to someone who has just spent the day wrangling small children or driving back and forth from an indoor job. Like the poet Mary Oliver so aptly puts it, we should all get closer to these things of beauty when we can for “each of them, though it stands/ in a crowd of many/ like a separate universe,// is lonely, the long work/ of turning their lives / into a celebration / is not easy. Come // and let us talk with those modest faces, / the simple garments of leaves, / the coarse roots in the earth / so uprightly burning.”