I like drawing sunflowers because of their obvious structure. Despite the repetition, each petal and sepal is slightly different so in drawing them you get into a rhythm, rather like practicing letterforms in calligraphy.
Near the bird feeder in the border we found one sunflower growing from a spilt seed. A few weeks ago it produced a single large flower-head, which has now gone to seed. Meanwhile five or six smaller flowers have appeared.
Sunflowers thrive in the rich soil of our border. Last year we tried daisy-like cosmos flowers here, which we’d grown from seed from a Gardeners’ World magazine. They grew tall and leafy but by mid-autumn they’d put out just a handful of flowers. I feel that we would have had more success in getting them to flower if our soil hadn’t been so rich.
As Storm Ellen swept across Britain on Friday, one of the sunflower heads snapped off and another looked as if it would be next to go. We brought three heads in as cut flowers.
Because they do so well in rich soil, we’ve decided to try growing sunflowers on our revamped meadow area next year. We’ll grow plenty of them from bird seed and hopefully there will be enough flowers for me to draw but plenty left of the plants for the insects and birds.