Native plants: sunflower power

Two summers ago at Bush Terminal, a handful of elderberry shrubs were planted in the ditch in the narrow strip of lawn between the bathroom and the beach. The logic was that the ditch would collect water, and elderberries like water.

It also appeared that these elderberries like the company of tall friends. At first the elderberries looked like mid-sized sticks that children stuck in the ground and leafed out as the season wore on. Their first summer at Bush Terminal was a dry one. Volunteers did water the plants, but even so many of their leaves hung limply like green flags of surrender — all except one, which stood next to a mammoth sunflower.

When I first saw its dinner plate sized leaves and branching stems I thought it was a baby Empress tree — a fast-growing invasive tree that exists in other parts of Bush Terminal. But its hairy leaves and stem belied that it could be a sunflower, so I let it be. The ditch was quite overgrown that summer and it was hard to locate the elderberries. The plant proved to be a good landmark when volunteers went searching for the elderberries to water them.

The elderberry that befriended the sunflower leafed out more than the others in its cohort. Its foliage was denser and livelier, probably because it lost less moisture while in the protective shade of the sunflower. Both the sunflower and elderberry grew together — the former resembling a young sapling rather than a sunflower, until its flower heads started appearing.

Sunflowers are native to North America, and Native Americans used them for a number of purposes, including as a food source and for weaving and basketry. But the plant bearing the dinner plate-sized flowers that many think of as an archetypical sunflower is the result of cultivated strains that are often developed overseas, and then returned to its native soil and grown as a monoculture for mass consumption, cooking oils and as a livestock feed.

The Bush Terminal specimen was not a returnee. She had a collection of sharing-plate sized flowers, or even espresso saucer sized flowers. Bumble bees and other pollinators enjoyed its offerings, and later, when the flowers bore seeds songbirds would dig into the buffet. The whole time she stood as a stately sentinel. I would not have been surprised to hear her holler: “Here are the elderberries! Don’t forget the elderberries!”

Sunflowers are annuals so her spirit shuffled off this mortal coil at the end of the season, but her earthly body remained standing throughout the winter. Like solar panels, she spent the summer gathering energy, which she used to grow her seeds or passed to other critters who used it in their never-ending mission to find more food. Her stems provided shelter in their piths to overwintering insects.

The next year tiny sunflower sprouts emerged where their parents once stood and soon enough part of the garden turned into a sunflower grove. The sunflowers dwarfed even the tallest gardeners. Was this what Alice felt like when she ate the wrong side of the caterpillar’s mushroom?

The garden has plenty of other beautiful plants — ones like the elderberries that were diligently selected, procured and planted — but often the sunflowers steal the show. Not only were they stunning, they were also extremely resilient and never needed us to water them. And now in the winter, despite being dead, the sunflowers have the stage all to themselves simply for being the last ones still standing, like they were when I visited the garden last month when the city was still in the clutches of a deep freeze.

The last one standing, the remains of a sunflower keeps watch over Bush Terminal Park in early February. Photo by Robin Kilmer

It was a day the real-feel temperature was several degrees below zero due to the wind chill. The waterfront resembled Hoth. I had a meeting near the waterfront, and I was curious to see the winter landscape so I ventured to the park after. In my snow pants and giant coat I looked ready for a romp on the moon. The chill was a cheese grater and my flesh was the cheese so I kept covered except for my eyes. My fingers burned when I took off my gloves to take pictures. Most of the garden was as buried in the snow as I was in layers.

But the sunflowers stood. Some of their dried heads remained. Many of the seeds had already taken the plunge to the patch of ground they would try to make home, and those not ready yet still clung to their mother. Even in their desiccated, tired-looking state the sunflowers hold future summers in their hands. All we have to do is let their children grow.