In late August and early September, when our lawns are brown and the native grasses are going to seed and the gardens are tired and everything but the soybeans have been harvested, there is something a little magical about the common sunflower. The cheery flowers are on the only green-leafed stems right now, and there are millions of them growing in every uncultivated field and along every rural road and highway.
With so many sunflowers on hand, you’d think us Kansans would get enough of the state flower. And yet…when word got out that the Grinter Farms sunflowers were about to peak, we couldn’t resist, and we weren’t alone. In the middle of a holiday weekend, people stopped what they were doing and drove out into the countryside to take in a million sunflowers.
The sight of all those cheerful flowers raising their faces to the sun stops you in your tracks. It takes your breath away. You want to study the face of every flower, and you want to see the entire ocean of them. There is this amazing moment of awe where the happy flowers make you smile back at them.
What I found most amazing about these sunflowers is that their joy is so contagious. Jim and I posted our pictures online yesterday, and today, our Facebook and Twitter feeds were full pictures of our friends, smiling while standing in the same field of happy flowers.
Jim and me with a lot of sunflowers.
It’s not too late to see the sunflowers, but don’t dawdle. Kris Grinter says this is really the week they’ll be at their best. Check out the Lawrence-Journal World article for information on how to get there and where to park. And if you want to take home a sunflower, that’s okay, too; just leave a donation of a dollar per flower in the boxes at the end of the fields.
Diana Staresinic-Deane 