Wild Sunflowers

These sunflowers are my favorite local wildflower. They show up in the middle of the summer-although they seemed later this year, perhaps due to lack of rain- and last into the fall. I am trying to seed them along one of our rock wall terraces in the back yard. We have more plants than last year, but I think birds must have eaten some of the seed I distributed. We are trying to leave the rock wall in back as natural as possible- in order to take advantage of the beautiful indigenous plants and to avoid irrigation. Kevin is grooming the scrub oak a bit and I am trying to encourage the wildflowers. The sunflowers remind me of a passage from My Antonia by Willa Cather:

"All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs' story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom."