Last year we successfully grew a giant sunflower in the garden, courtesy of our youngest grandson who had grown a leggy one foot tall plant from seed at school. I was surprised (a) that it grew at all here in the cold and windy North if Scotland, and (b) how tall it grew – it reached 2.5m high and had a huge flower the size of a dinner-plate!
My husband duly harvested the seeds from the head and this year just for fun he sowed a few in some compost to see if any came up. Of the six seeds he planted, three germinated. Two sadly withered and died, but one kept the faith and finally graduated from a pot on the kitchen window sill to a sunny spot in the garden, pretty much where last year’s specimen had grown.
This year’s plant is about the same height as last year’s, although a little less robust in the stalk department, and thankfully over this past week the head is beginning to flower but it’s stubbornly facing over the garden fence away from us so it’s almost impossible to get a decent shot from our side of the fence… Here it is four days in a row, taken from some pretty weird angles, slowly opening out bit by bit.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week asks us to find images that go along with the Beatles hit ‘Here comes the sun’, so I thought of my opening sunflower and here we are!
PS I’m going to give it another couple of days then if it still doesn’t turn its head to face me I’ll ask my neighbour if she minds if I photograph it from her garden instead 🙂
