Sunflower Season in the Sunflower State

Cultivated beauties. Photo by Burt Morey. Used with permission.

 by Julie Tollefson

It’s sunflower season in Kansas, the Sunflower State, and oh my do those yellow flowers make people happy.

Last weekend, a sunflower field a couple miles from my house drew such a massive crowd that law enforcement officials advised the owners to shut it down at midday. (Don’t ask me how one shuts down a field on a public road—that’s a mystery.) At one point, traffic heading to the field was reportedly backed up more than five miles—hundreds of cars, maybe? I actually tried to calculate something approaching an answer. To start, I imagined everyone drove a large-ish car at 16.5 feet long and allowed a generous 10 feet between them (26.5 feet total). Divide 26,400 feet (5,280 feet per mile times 5 miles) by 26.5.  Answer? A thousand cars sat on that highway, occupants eager to get a selfie in the sunflower field. Whew! That’s a lot of math for a writer.

My husband and I stayed out of the way—way out of the way. Instead, we spent the day exploring the backroads of another county seventy-five miles to the west, where we had the highways and the prairie and the state flower—the wild native Helianthus—all to ourselves.

Wild sunflower at sunrise, western Kansas.

I’m not immune to the beauty of the cultivated sunflowers, but my heart lies with the tough little flowers that doggedly take root in the ditches and field edges and stream banks across the state.  The state flower, once considered a noxious weed, thrives wherever it finds a bit of soil. It reaches for the sun and dances in the legendary Kansas wind. No cultivation, no coddling necessary.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in the tale of two sunflowers.

The cultivated sunflower has an easy life, a gorgeous home among its brethren with all the fertilizer and water it could want. It’s the society matron, straight-backed and proper. It’s the son who follows his grandfather, father, and brothers into the family investment business. It’s beautiful and privileged and wants for nothing. 

Except. 

Except the society matron hides a dark secret, her perfect hair and makeup nothing more than a mask for her insecurities. The son yearns to ditch the family business and study art history.

The wild ones.

Then there’s the wild side, scraping for purchase in a harsh land. The PI who operates at the edge of the law. The homesteaders who, heeding Horace Greeley’s advice to “Go west, young man,” leave the comforts of New York to eke out an existence on 160 treeless acres of the High Plains. To them, life within the confines of the field looks easy, stress-free, but would they sacrifice freedom for security?

The best stories have room for both. Indeed, these tensions—between the face our character shows the world and the one she sees in the mirror, between the desire to break away from the strictures of community or to break in to the life of luxury—are the foundation of the best best stories.

But enough of lessons from the secret lives of sunflowers. This week, I just want to enjoy the beauty of late summer and the yellow flowers of all shapes and sizes that inspire people to get outside, experience fresh air and sunshine, and feel joy in nature.

A couple of publication notes:

• I imagine all states have resources to help residents and visitors enjoy the roads less traveled. Here, we have the Byways of Kansas guide. A new version came out this summer, and I had the pleasure of writing about two of our byways: The Western Vistas Historic Byway that cuts through the High Plains of western Kansas (near and dear to my heart) and the newly designated Land and Sky Scenic Byway in far northwest Kansas, which travels through the truly stunning Arikaree Breaks.
• My newest piece for Lawrence Magazine takes a look at the cool story of how a local high school student’s turn with a metal detector led to the first physical evidence of what is likely the second largest ancient city in the United States.