Whether they drop the seeds by accident or by design, before or after passing them through their tiny digestive tracts, is a mystery to me. All I know is that every summer a forest of sunflowers springs up around the bird feeder. This year\’s crop was exceptional, but it is almost over by now. I have pulled up the dead stalks and the empty flowers and thrown them away, with one exception: the eleven-foot-tall sunflower.
Today, before clearing out the flower bed of its summer detritus, I intended to dispose of the bent-over marvel. But as I put the pruning shears against the inch-thick stem, something held me back. Not only did the plant have a number of ripening brown flower heads, but no fewer than seventeen Van Gogh-bright blooms. It would have been a crime against Nature to rip it out.
In its bent-over condition, however, it was impeding my access to the flower bed. I called my husband, and he dragged a ladder out of the garage, and I handed him a length of green baling twine and pointed upwards, and he fastened the sunflower to the porch\’s rain gutter.
Now it stands in solitary splendor at the end of the denuded flower bed, calling to the chickadees who planted it to come and feast on its ripening seeds.
I never knew that chickadees were farmers.
3 Responses
How wonderful….I love plants like these, they seem inhabited by special plant souls to me. I had a ragweed volunteer in the front parkway bed this year…it became 7 feet tall in mostly shade! Oh my. I left it as I just had to see how big it would get. Alas, the city noticed it and parkways are not supposed to have plants over 3 feet…so I took it down, reluctantly.Boo and Sniff.
We get a few under the bird feeder every year. Many-blossomed stalk this year, but fallen over, and I must take care of it! Eleven feet, hunh? Wow.
Jaimie, I assume you're not allergic to ragweed?Indigo, that's Ed's estimate, so you know it's on the low side.