golden blooms on a summer day

There was a thin layer of frost in the early morning a few days this week. It is the middle of winter, of course, but the sun has also been bright and sunny, tricking my brain into remembering the sunny days of summer when the flowers were all in bloom and the bees and the birds were busy flying about the garden. What other flower reminds us most of a summer day than the shining suns in the garden - the sunflowers?

I grew my first sunflowers here the first summer we moved into this house. That was almost five years ago. I planted some Mammoth Grey sunflowers next to a new hedge of Emerald Green arborvitaes. By the end of that summer, their large, round faces following the path of the sun throughout the day have towered over the hedge. I've grown different varieties of sunflowers since then. Last summer, I added the perennial Maximilian sunflower next to the bean trellis, but the birds seem to adore the annual variety more. I've planted different additional varieties of common sunflowers every year and saved the seeds for replanting: Dwarf Teddy Bear, Dwarf Madri Gras, Autumn Beauty, Busy Bee, Evening Sun, Zohar.

This year, I'm planting some hybrid single stem sunflowers (from Procut's Gold Lite Series), as well as some Hella Sonnenblume (a dwarf with 12" sturdy stems) and Magic Roundabout (a 6ft hybrid variety with a dark red center), which I am growing for the first time. I'm also planning on growing more Mammoth Grey this year and planting them together with pole beans for the first time.

My gardening days, truth be told, have followed a broken line. There was a garden in my memory;  another, a short-lived garden outside our apartment in Ankara, Turkey; a tomato garden at our townhouse in Virginia; a three-year-old garden within an 18-foot walled home in San Salvador, El Salvador; and a small vegetable and flower garden in our 1913 house in Seattle.

Now, here in a garden in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains, I've planted evergreens and fruit trees, hopeful for all roots to flourish like a coral reef and for my gardening days to turn into a prolonged, unfaltering line at last.

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