For my friends, A. and K.    

     Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I am not a gardener. Don’t get me wrong, I love flowers and plants. I love curling my fingers into rich, pungent soil, gently unraveling the tiny root systems already encasing even young plants, coaxing those immature tendrils to grow quickly and spread deep. There’s something almost maternal for me in the feel of tucking those fragile plants into their warm, cozy beds of earth. I pat them gently and hope that Earth, Sun, and Rain will do the rest, helping my little green babies to grow tall and strong and beautiful.

     But, as I’ve already mentioned, I am not a true gardener. Worse, I’m a careless gardener. I get distracted from tending my little seedlings, and inevitably, they end up drowning through my overwatering after a dry spell, or baking, crisping, and crumbling under the exuberant heat of the Sun. I sigh my remorse, read again the stick containing the plant care instructions, and vow that next time, I will pay closer attention to the details. Next time, I’ll try a different variety.

     Have you ever planted sunflowers? Those flowers are amazing. In French, they are called tournesol, which means “turns with the sun”. This refers to the sunflower’s habit of literally turning as the sun makes its way across the sky so that the sunflower always faces the light. I find myself thinking from time to time that for an herbicidal maniac like myself, a plant that could at least control its own sun exposure would be a welcome addition to my garden.

     I think if I could be any flower, I’d like to be a sunflower. There are times when I, too, find myself tilting my face up to greet the joyful sun, particularly after the dark days of a long Minnesota winter. I crane my neck as far back as I can and feel the warmth and light fill me with contentment, and for a moment, I, too, am a sunflower. But then I remember some trifling problem, some slight, some chore, and turn my face away from the sun, forgetting to revel in the joy it brings. I am, I fear, more like the common thistle, cantankerous and prickly.

     People can be a lot like plants and flowers; in fact, many of the expressions we use to describe people originate from plants. There are “Fresh as a daisy”; “Cool as a cucumber”; “Lovely as a rose”; and one of my all-time favorites from a bygone era, “She’s a real tomato”—that one always makes me a laugh for no particular reason. But you never really see sunflowers used to describe people. Why is that?

     They have at least as long a lineage as the rose. They are as beautiful as the daisy, and more useful: you can eat sunflower seeds, cook with sunflower oil, brew tea from sunflower stems. The ancient Aztecs, they say, even used to worship the sunflower. Have you ever seen anyone worship a daisy? They are the flibbertigibbets of the flower world.

     I once watched a time-lapse video of a field of sunflowers and it was startling to see the determination, the single-mindedness, if you will, of that field as the sun traveled overhead. There was something mystical in the pas de deux between sun and flower, something I could see, and recognize, but feel I will somehow never understand.

     Don’t sunflowers ever get tired? Don’t they ever get discouraged? Don’t they ever feel bowed down by the winds buffeting them? Is there ever a morning where they wake up and don’t feel like getting out of bed? No, they don’t. The storms come, the winds blow, the drought sears, the rains lash at them through the night. But in the morning, the sun rises, and those amazing flowers lift their heads to greet it; they make what appears to be a conscious decision to turn their faces to the light, every day, no matter how fierce the storm of the night, no matter how heavy their heads feel, no matter how tempting it must be some mornings to just allow themselves to bend down to the fragrant earth and stay there.

     No. There is something deep within, down in its very roots, something that lifts the sunflower’s head each day as the sun comes over the horizon, something that inspires it, something that motivates it, something that makes it choose the light every time. Whatever it is, roses don’t have it, daisies don’t have it, and I can vouch for thistles—they don’t have it either. But what a gift the sunflower gives me, and how I am continually inspired by it, to keep my own head held high, no matter the storm, no matter the winds, no matter the rain. The sunflower calls to me, reminding me to do as it does: to turn my face to the light, to always follow the sun.