They are everywhere this year—right now. The lovely scraggly sunflowers of my Kansas youth. Not the sturdy nine-footers that gardeners covet for borders or birdseed. The ones with giant faces–often planted next to the hollyhocks. No, at the moment Montana roadsides and gravel pits and construction sites sport spindly plants a couple-three feet tall with small but exuberant blooms.
I think of them as Kansas—not Montana—flowers. We were, after all, the Sunflower State. And that symbol adorned all our tourist trinkets and maps and road signs. I noticed them as a child—and wanted so much to make bouquets of them. Bring them into the house. Savor that exuberant sunniness. And I didn’t believe Mother when she said they were sticky and prickly and unlikely to survive. Until a trip to Coronado Heights* gave me an easy opportunity to pick a few. Mother, of course, was right and I couldn’t get rid of the tacky adhesive on my hands until we got home to soap and water.
Sunflowers still make me happy. So when I began noticing their abundance around Helena I found more places to drive when I was out on errands. Just for fun. Just to see sunflowers. And finally—years after my affection for sunflowers began—I realized that I didn’t know why they were such cheerful roadside decorations.
Turns out there are easy answers. Those Jack-in-the-Beanstalk sunflowers are annuals—the species and seed long since honed to produce more seeds for human use. In contrast, the roadside plants are sometimes perennials, but for sure a species that re-seeds itself year after year. And here’s the key: those seeds thrive in disturbed soil. The very sandy cut-and-fill stuff lining highways. Or mucked up construction and gravel excavations. Paved roads and trails provide even more of what sunflowers crave: the run-off from rainstorms, heat stored in concrete or asphalt, and unobstructed sunlight with few other plants tall enough to compete for air and light.
So our rather idyllic Montana summer—with just the right elixirs of sun and rain– and our housing construction boom have made those ordinary, sturdy sunflowers so happy. As they now do me! ©
*Coronado Heights is the southern-most bluff in a series of seven, known as the Smoky Hills. The hill is located northwest of Lindsborg, almost 30 miles from my hometown, McPherson. Supposedly, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and his men viewed the prairie from this lookout point 300 feet above the valley floor. Chain mail from Spanish armor has been found in the area. In the 1930s, Works Progress Administration (WPA) men built the little stone castle atop the hill at Coronado Heights Park and stone picnic tables and fire pits nearby. It was a special spot for our family to picnic and classmate Curtis Rafelson held his birthday parties here every year.
