GARDENING : A New Day Dawns on Sunflowers

The sunflower, popular as a design image and cut flower in recent years, is leaving in its wake a new garden favorite. While interest in the flower that Vincent van Gogh and others have found so irresistible has never really gone out of style, it is just now having its day in the sun in home gardens.

It takes longer to generate new plants than it does new textiles and ceramics, hence the time lag between design trend and horticulture. But, while design trends come and go, plants put down roots.

Growers needed time to experiment with hybrids bred for ornamental rather than food production value before deciding on the best and producing enough for mass distribution. Nurseries needed to test the market before loading up on sunflower seed and plants.

And cutting-edge gardeners needed a season or two to see if they could incorporate these brash, in-your-face newcomers into their refined cottage gardens. Consequently, as a horticultural trend, sunflowers are just now coming into full flower.

“It all started about three or four years ago, when florists and bucket shops began offering a Japanese hybrid sunflower called ‘Taiyo’ as a cut flower, and customers came in asking if they could grow it in their own gardens,” says Mary Lou Heard of Heard’s Country Gardens in Westminster.

However, seeds were nearly impossible to obtain outside the florist trade at that time, she says. But soon other growers, quick to note consumer interest, began their own hybridizing programs.

“They changed the color, they changed the height of the plant, they changed the size of the center disk, they changed the size of the quills (petals), and they changed the growing habit to produce multibranching plants so there would be more flowers to cut,” Heard says. “Then they picked the ones they liked and began propagating them like crazy to produce enough for the seed catalogue companies.”

Heard ordered every sunflower variety she could get her hands on last year and tried them out in a test bed before deciding on which ones to propagate for sale at the nursery this year.

Based on staff and customer reactions, she concluded local gardeners are not bothered by the height of some of these plants, despite the limited size of their yards. Tall fellows like ‘Henry Wilde,’ which soars to seven feet, were as admired as the comparatively diminutive three-foot ‘Sunrich Lemon.’

Any sun-kissed color seemed fine, too. The pastel yellow ‘Valentine’ was appreciated as much as the nearly mahogany ‘Velvet Queen,’ for instance.

But neither customers nor staff responded to varieties where the proportions between quill and disk size were drastically altered.

“They didn’t like pompon-like doubles without disks, or varieties that were all disk with just a fringe of petals,” Heard says.

“They wanted sunflowers to look like sunflowers.”

Pat Hackman of Fountain Valley already has the kind of cottage garden many less experienced gardeners still hope to achieve. Lots of roses, bearded iris, larkspur and foxglove in a soothing color combination of lavender, purple and pink with just enough jolts of white and butter yellow to keep things lively.

Yet, in the midst of the polished refinement, Hackman found room for something as rowdy as ‘Henry Wilde.’ Though this variety of ornamental sunflower has the moderate-sized flowers normally preferred for cutting (five to six inches wide), the plant itself grows to an imposing seven-foot height.

Hackman sowed seeds in a patch of sunny bare earth near the block wall enclosing her back yard every few weeks from March through early August last year. Doing so provided her with a cut-flower supply--as well as leftovers for the local avian population--through early October. She’s doing it again this year.

She plays up the all-American quality of sunflowers by including rustic garden ornaments in the same area--a small windmill, a wagon wheel and a wheelbarrow full of potted red geraniums. Also included in the vignette is a rusty metal bucket used as a planter filled with the dwarf sunflower ‘Big Smile’ (“So cute you want to hug it,” Hackman says) underplanted with creeping zinnia (Sanvitalia) , which is a four-inch-tall sunflower look-alike.

For a more vivid contrast, she suggests combining ‘Big Smile’ with nasturtiums.

“I particularly like ‘Alaska’ because of its pretty variegated leaves,” Hackman says. “And ‘Empress of India,’ with its jewel-red flowers and blue-green leaves, would look smashing, maybe with some dark blue lobelia around the edges for even more color.”

Beverly Weber-Fow of Tustin is an artist as well as a gardener, and she brings the same creative daring to her landscape. The lawn in front of her house has been converted into one big flower bed. Last year she planted a double row of ornamental sunflowers here, and not at the back of the border where you might expect, but up front, just behind the sidewalk.

“I don’t remember what they were, but I interplanted a tall variety with a shorter, boxier kind to help prop them up in the Santa Ana winds,” says Weber-Fow. “It worked well, too.”

The sunflowers screened out the view of the street and gave visitors wandering the meandering pathway through the wide border the feeling they were in an enclosed world.

“And that was exactly the effect I hoped for,” she says.

Weber-Fow likes sunflowers with other hot-colored flowers, such as magenta-flowered amaranth.

“That’s a combination they use a lot in Kansas--which is where I’m from--that I’ve always liked,” she says.

Other partnerships that please her are tall marigolds, the red tubes of pineapple sage and the “last of the cosmos.”

Weber-Fow did not deadhead her sunflowers, giving the birds a feast. They returned the favor by scattering seed, and she had volunteer plants emerging in her garden all through fall, winter and up through last spring.

This sight was a revelation to Colleen Mongan of Cowan Heights, a gardening friend, who had considered sunflowers strictly a summer annual.

“Sunflower colors look even better in fall, I’ve decided,” she says. “I’m going to plant a second crop in August this year.”

Fritz Steinbach of Huntington Beach also used the sunflower screen idea last year, when he converted his parkway into a cutting garden devoted exclusively to ornamental sunflowers. Like Heard, he planted every variety he could lay his hands on.

Some of his favorites were ‘Lemon Queen’ (“gorgeous 10-inch wide flowers exactly the color of supermarket lemons”), ‘Evening Sun,’ (“dramatic bronzes”), ‘Italian White,’ (“the flowers went on and on and on”) and--to harvest for his pet parrot--the food sunflower, ‘Russian Giant.’

Then, of course, there’s the traditional way to use sunflowers--in combination with summer vegetables. Mongan, for instance, finds them very pretty peeking up over green pole beans in her raised vegetable beds. And Hackman has a friend who grows sunflowers along with tomatoes, squash, peppers and pumpkins in her parkway every summer--a sight that never fails to delight the neighborhood children.

If you’ve always hesitated to plant sunflowers because you thought they would overpower your small garden, reconsider this year. There are now ornamental varieties available in sizes as small as 18-inches high that even the tiniest yard can find room for. And they have the same cheery faces their taller relatives do.

“There is something very endearing about sunflower faces,” Hackman says. “Whenever you look at one, somehow you just can’t help but smile back.”