Sunflowers

I really go for the naturalistic look in the garden. It's fun to see what flowers reseed themselves and how the patterns in the garden dynamically change from season to season and year to year. This purple coneflower Echinacea purpurea just popped up between the vegetable boxes, and it looks much better than the ones I planted.

Fall flowers are really nice. I love the color in the late season. We get a lot of it from our sunflowers Helianthus annuus. When we first moved in to our house and I saw the sunflowers pop up I was so excited. After a couple of years, though, when they started spreading all over, they kind of moved over into the weed category for me. I pull out a lot of sunflower sprouts every spring, but I always miss some, and I can't bear to pull all of them out.



Plus the birds love them, and it's so entertaining to watch the little birds lite on the stems and twist around to pick out the seeds out of the flower heads. Plus they have such an unassuming, simplistic beauty that's hard to ignore. It's also nice that they don't require any additional watering at all.

The state flower of Kansas is the sunflower, yet it was once on their list of noxious weeds. Here's an excerpt from an article that chronicles the status of this flower.

Despite a glaring sun and 94-degree heat on the afternoon of Aug. 9, 1820, zoologist Thomas Say could hardly take his eyes off the Kansas landscape as a U.S. Army mapping party rounded the spot on the Arkansas River that is now Great Bend.

"The soil was a deep fine white sand, which rendered the traveling very laborious," Say wrote in the daily logbook. "The chief produce of these tracts of unmixed sand is the sunflower, often the dense and almost exclusive occupant."

Thus began the recorded history of the sunflower in Kansas, a journey that has taken the lowly wildflower on a rags-to-riches ride - -- from a once-scorned noxious weed to a cheerful, globally recognized symbol of Kansas and the Great Plains.

More than 182 years after Say's written reference, historians credit the sunflower's dramatic reversal of fortunes in Kansas to the late Morris County state senator, George P. Morehouse, whose two- year effort in the Legislature led to the designation of the sunflower as the official state flower nearly 100 years ago --- on March 12, 1903.

"Kansans have always taken what we have and made something special," said Kansas historian Roy Bird. "The sunflower is a good example of something that most people would consider a weed and (we) made it into our state symbol by celebrating adversity. It's a real example of what Kansas character is all about."

Though Morehouse's bill became law in 1903 without a dissenting vote, Kansas lawmakers haven't always honored the prairie flower, having declared it a noxious weed in 1895.

- Sunflower: Enduring symbol - The Topeka Capital-Journal, Jan 29, 2003

Even if some still call it a weed, what a glorious weed it is. If only more weeds were like it.