Why We Grow Sunflowers

On simple seeds, generous flowers, and finding what earns its place in the garden.

There is a moment every summer when the sunflowers begin to rise above everything else.

For weeks, they are simply rows of green. Then come the buds, followed by the first flashes of color, and almost suddenly the garden has a new horizon. Cream, yellow, rust and bronze appear above the zinnias and herbs, catching the light and changing the view from one week to the next.

Sunflowers have become part of the backdrop of summer at Topo Pino.

And for all their eventual drama, they begin remarkably simply: with seeds sown directly into the soil.

That combination has made them one of the clearest expressions of how we are learning to garden here. We are increasingly drawn to plants that don't require endless intervention to produce something extraordinary — flowers that are beautiful where they grow, useful when cut, generous to the life around them, and straightforward enough that we want to grow them again.

Sunflowers do all of that.

A Simple Seed, an Enormous Return

We direct-sow our sunflowers into the garden after the danger of frost has passed.

No trays of seedlings to tend indoors and no elaborate planting process. A seed goes into the soil, and over the course of a New England summer it can become a plant several feet tall, carrying a flower large enough to change the view across the garden.

For the relatively small amount of effort they ask of us, the return feels almost disproportionate.

Their height gives the garden structure. Repeated through the rows, they create rhythm and a backdrop for the lower flowers growing around them. Their blooms are cut for jars and arrangements, and bees gather on the flower heads throughout the day.

We are learning to garden with a simple idea in mind: put our effort where it gives the most in return, and choose plants that give generously.

A Sunflower Is Not Just a Sunflower

Our second season growing them has also taught us how much variation can exist within such a familiar flower.

One of the most useful distinctions in a cutting garden is between single-stem and branching sunflowers.

Single-stem varieties produce one primary bloom on a long, straight stem. Planted together, they can create a wonderfully orderly sweep through the garden, and their individual stems make them particularly useful for cutting.

Branching varieties behave differently. A single plant sends out multiple stems, buds and flowers, often blooming over a longer period. They take up more room and have a looser, more exuberant shape.

We grow both.

The single-stem varieties give us repetition and simplicity. The branching varieties bring movement, surprise, and some of the richest colors in the garden.

We wouldn't want to choose between them because they aren't really doing the same job.

The Space Between the Seeds

Even the way sunflowers are planted can change what they become.

With single-stem varieties, closer spacing generally encourages smaller flowers and slimmer stems — often a useful scale for cutting and arranging. Give those same plants more room, and they tend to produce larger blooms on thicker stems.

It's a small detail, but exactly the sort of detail we find ourselves noticing more with each season.

The garden becomes less about simply choosing what to plant and more about understanding how we want each plant to behave.

Sometimes that begins with something as simple as the space between two seeds.

Flowers to Share, Flowers for the Bees

There is another choice hidden inside the sunflower seed packet: pollen or pollenless.

Many sunflowers bred specifically for cutting are pollenless. Indoors, that's wonderfully practical — no dusting of golden pollen across a table or linen.

Pollenless sunflowers can still provide nectar for visiting bees, while pollen-producing varieties offer pollen as an additional food source.

We didn't think much about that distinction when we first began choosing sunflowers. Now, after watching bees disappear almost completely into the centers of the flowers, we do.

It has become another question we want to carry forward: how can the same garden work beautifully for us and for everything else living in it?

The answer doesn't necessarily have to be one variety or the other.

There is room for both.

Beyond Yellow

Perhaps our favorite discovery has simply been color.

The classic golden sunflower will always have a place here, but the varieties we find ourselves stopping to photograph are often the unexpected ones.

Some open with petals so pale they appear almost cream in the afternoon light. Others arrive in rust, copper, burgundy and deep bronze. Dark centers make certain blooms feel almost painterly.

The colors change the garden's character as the season moves along.

The pale flowers feel like high summer. The deeper bronzes seem to anticipate September before we're quite ready.

Together, they make the sunflower rows feel less like a crop and more like part of the landscape.

What Earns Its Place

After two seasons, we're beginning to understand that this may be one of the most useful questions we can ask of anything we grow:

What earns its place in the garden?

Not because every plant needs to be productive or practical. Beauty itself is reason enough.

But the plants we love most often seem to give us several things at once.

Sunflowers create the garden's backdrop while giving us armfuls of flowers to cut and share with friends and family. From something as simple as a seed pressed into the soil comes extraordinary height, color, and movement. They draw bees into the rows, change with the season, and offer enough variety that, after two summers, we're still learning how we want to grow them.

There are things we'll refine next year.

We'll think more deliberately about the balance between single-stem and branching varieties, how closely we space them, which colors we want to repeat, and how we succession sow so the display — and the harvest — lasts longer.

That's part of the process too.

Plant. Observe. Keep what works. Change what doesn't. Grow it again.

For all their height and drama, sunflowers are wonderfully uncomplicated.

A seed, a little space, a summer of sun — and eventually, an entirely different garden.

There will be more next year.