by Mary Ann Mcgivern

Created on: August 13, 2008   Last Updated: September 21, 2008

Dreams of Fields of Sunflowers

I live near downtown St. Louis and years ago I watched the block of houses across the street from me decay. The city bulldozed the rubble and a tree into a huge hole it dug, leaving a barren clay field. That May I planted most of it with sunflowers. I paid the city a dollar for a gardening permit in the hope that, come August, it would look like a Kansas postcard of huge yellow flower heads, all raised to the sun.

The glory of the cultivated sunflower has burst forth in dozens of new varieties. The stand-by has been the mammoth Russian grown from grey and white striped seeds. Now Sun 891 and Golden Peredovik have been bred for tastier, softer-shelled seeds for people and birds. The hybrid, pollenless varieties include giant sungold that looks more like a chrysanthemum, Italian white, deep red velvet queen, valentine and sonia with fluffy double rays, and big smile which is short stemmed, can be grown in pots, and blooms just 55 days after planting.

I bought them all because I had this vision. I think I dreamed it one night in late November. On May 1st I would sow sunflowers on that clay field of weeds and broken bricks in clay. I would transform this small sector of urban blight into prairie farmland.

I had no notion how grandiose my project was until I planted the first row. It took three packets of seeds, one seed per hole, down the middle of the lot, parallel to the street. I didn't have a tractor or even a plow. I had a spade and a pitchfork. I started at 6 AM and had to stop at noon, exhausted. A dozen lots with 40 foot fronts, 60 feet to the back alley. Only now did I start to do the math. How many rows? How many seeds?

Friends had started sunflowers for me in tiny pots and paper cups. Transplanted, they filled half a row. What to do! I purchased fifty pounds of Russian mammoth sunflower seeds for twenty-five dollars. The sack sat on my front stairway, just inside the door. Every morning I filled my tool apron with three cups of seeds and carried my hoe across the street. I developed a rhythm: whack the clay soil, drop in a seed, brush the dirt back with my foot and on to the next spot. I planted half or maybe a whole row and scattered whatever seed was left across the lot.

I put my second row in the middle of the lot and moved toward the alley, then came streetside, day after day, so the panorama would unfold toward my house. Every morning, as I dug into the clay, I encouraged myself with the notion that I was doing pop performance

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