Not all sunflowers are suited for the garden

SUNFLOWERS ARE orphans of the flower garden. It’s not that the plants are not widely grown. It’s that most sunflower growing is on a commercial scale for the seeds and oil within the sunny heads. Sunflower stems and heads even have been processed into a high quality paper, and the stems alone have been burned for fuel, or converted into a fiber as luxurious as silk.

And where do sunflowers usually turn up in backyards? Not in the flower garden, but commonly as a single row of plants along the north edge of the vegetable patch (once again useful: this time as support up which pole beans can clamber). Otherwise, odd plants turn up here or there near a fence, garage, or house, perhaps from seeds deliberately planted or accidentally dropped by a passing bird.

The reason for sunflowers’ absence from flower gardens is the plants’ ungainly habit and large size. This is especially true of commonly grown annual sunflower (Helianthus annuus) varieties like “Mammoth Russian” or “Black Giant.”

With wrist-thick stalks, gawky leaves, and single, dinnerplate-sized blossoms, “Mammoth Russian” is just too crude to stand alongside marigolds and delphiniums.

There are sunflowers suited to the flower garden. From the same blood as “Mammoth Russian” is another variety of annual sunflower named “Teddy Bear,” topping out at a mere 3 feet and with 5-inch flowers. Even shorter is “Sunspot,” with 10-inch wide blooms on 2-foot high plants. The color spectrum for cultivated sunflowers extends beyond shades of yellow. There are varieties with petal colors in shades of off-white, chestnut brown, or wine-red. “Italian White” is a pale, white variety eligible for the flower garden with its slender stature, diminutive (4-inch diameter) flowers, and 4-foot height. Still other strains have bicolor flowers, perhaps dark red toward the center of the petal, then pale orange or yellow towards the outside.

There are well-nigh 60 species of sunflower, many of them perennial. A list of species noteworthy for the flower garden would include the thinleaf sunflower (H. decapetalus), a perennial native from Canada to Georgia bearing scads of 3-inch flowers on 5-foot plants in late summer. Probably the best perennial sunflower for the small garden is the ashy sunflower (H. mollis), blooming from July through September. H. debilis is a species diminutive in all respects and notable for purple mottling on its stems, and flowers that are especially good for cutting. H. orgyalis is the least coarse of the sunflowers, with dense foliage and a profusion of blooms — how unsunflowerlike!

The species hybridize readily, and some of the most useful hybrids for the flower garden include the annual sunflower and the twinleaf sunflower as parents. These hybrids (designated H. x multiflorus) have taken on the perennial character of the latter parent. “Flora Pleno” is one example, a plant growing to about 4 feet and bearing 3-inch blooms with petals so doubled that the yellow flowers resemble those of pompom dahlias more than sunflowers. “Triumph de Gand,” another hybrid, bears semi-double, yellow flowers on plants 3 feet high.

All sunflowers are easy to grow, generally tolerating drought and enough cold so that seeds of annual sorts can be sown a week or two before the date of the last frost. Of course, sunflowers do need sun. To gather your own seed for next season, protect the seedheads from birds either by swaddling the drying heads in cheesecloth, or by putting the almost dry heads in an attic to finish drying.

Last year I put seedheads from a medium-sized sunflower with burnished red-brown flowers in my garage loft to dry. This past May I rubbed the seeds out of the seedhead, then sprinkled them densely into a furrow. Germination was excellent, and necessitated thinning the young plants to between a half-foot and a foot apart. Just now the sunny flowers — more reminiscent of twilight than of midday sun — are opening, adding a row of color to the far end of my ... er ... vegetable garden.

Any gardening questions? Email them to me at garden@ leereich.com and I’ll try answering them directly or in this column. Come visit my garden at leereich.com/blog