One recent visitor to my yard asked, “Why all the sunflowers?”
“I didn’t plant them,” I said. “Not even one.”
“You didn’t plant them?”
“They’re all volunteers. I used to plant sunflowers, but lately, every year, they just pop up on their own all over. I think the birds spread them. I just try to prevent them from taking over my vegetable beds.”
I have to prune back sunflowers elsewhere so I can walk near the house.
They choke paths between fruit trees.
Some have grown twelve feet and then toppled and yet kept blooming.
They are truly throughout the cultivated half-acre of my yard.
This sunflower invasion has come with a curiosity. Why do they all look more or less the same, and why do they all look unlike the sunflowers I planted in the past?
Here are some photos of sunflowers that I sowed in my yard a number of years ago, and from which I believe the current volunteer sunflowers descend:
I’ll note that I’ve never seen sunflowers growing in my neighbors’ yards. Sunflowers have been self-sowing in my yard for years, after I started planting the above cultivated varieties (among a few others) initially.
Over the years, the volunteers that came after them have started to look more and more similar and less and less like the original cultivated varieties. In fact, they look most like the wild ones that you see growing on the sides of roads.
Which has made me wonder: Do all types of sunflowers eventually revert to looking like the wild ones?
You might like to check out my post on “Growing sunflowers in Southern California.”
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Love them! I do buy from Sunflower Steve each year to support his sunflower breeding efforts and then enjoy the volunteers that pop up every which way in the garden!