After some patience and steady watering, we began to have flowers bloom.
This beaming photo of a sunflower was actually taken in my own backyard. Right at the beginning of April 2020, my wife and I moved to a new neighborhood in Indiana. Our backyard was large and flat, and lacked in any color beyond the green of the grass. She asked me to dig up a portion of the backyard so that she could plant a wildflower garden. After a few hours of removing the soil and tilling the ground, she was happily planting seed packet after seed packet of wildflowers.
Neither of us had ever planted wildflowers, let alone wildflowers from seed, so we were pleasantly surprised when the garden began to grow. It was full of life, but we had no idea whether they were the wildflowers that we had planted or something that had blown in from the soybean fields. After some patience and steady watering, we began to have flowers bloom.
I was excited to have the different flowers growing in our yard. There were bachelor buttons, daisies, blanket flowers, sunflowers, and more. With blues, yellows, reds, and oranges; the garden was lit up with color!
Although I found it to be quite beautiful, the pollinators enjoyed it even more. We had bees, wasps, butterflies, beetles, and all sorts of other insects flying and crawling about on our plants. I have dozens if not hundreds of photos of the insects moving from flower to flower.
Bachelor buttons, daisies, blanket flowers, sunflowers, and more
more flowers began to bloom anywhere that there were leaves
I took this photo one bright morning an hour or two after the sun had risen. The light was falling evenly across the sunflowers that had risen to a height of more than five feet. Unlike most sunflower plants that you see in people's gardens, ours had more than one flower. There were leaves that grew from the stalk every 6-8 inches. After the first flower grew from the top of the plant, more flowers began to bloom anywhere that there were leaves.
Sunflowers are known to be useful for more than just their aesthetic beauty. At the end of the season once the flowers had dried out, we were able to harvest them for their seeds. After an hour in the oven, we had ourselves a delightful salty snack!
Sunflower Fun Facts
- Sunflowers can grow to heights of up to ten feet!
- The scientific name of the common sunflower is Helianthus annuus.
- What we typically call the flower is actually a flower head. The yellow "petals" we see are called ray flowers, and there are small florets called disk flowers.
- When sunflowers are not yet mature, the young flowers will follow the sun. This is called heliotropism. This stops once they are mature, and most sunflowers will face east.
Pingback: Black-Eyed Susan
[…] Common Sunflower […]
Have you ever encountered any unexpected challenges while trying to capture the perfect shot of a sunflower in the wild? Share your wildest photography stories and tips for capturing the beauty of nature in its purest form.
Pingback: Jimsonweed
[…] Common Sunflower […]