Thousands flock to farm for sunflower selfies
Thousands wanted photos among blooms
The phone at the Bogle birdseed farm in Hamilton, Ont., rang through to voicemail on Tuesday. It had been about 72 hours since the Crazy Day, as Brad Bogle was now calling it.
“Please be advised,” the voice on the answering machine said, “we are closed and will never open again for sunflower pictures.”
Brad Bogle, who runs the birdseed farm with his mom and dad, spent much of Tuesday guarding the entrance to their laneway, shooing people away, stopping them from pulling into his farm or parking on the side of the busy road that runs past their sunflower patch. Some did not take it so well.
“I’m getting the finger quite often,” Bogle, 36, said. “I’m getting people yelling at me. I’m getting people telling me, ‘I drove two hours, three hours, I deserve to get my picture taken.’ ”
Bogle’s neighbours laid out tires on their front lawns, or old stacks of wood, anything to deter the unwelcome visitors from parking on their properties. The problem, for this stretch of Safari Road, is Bogle’s sunflowers are in bloom and people are coming from all over for a photo with them.
“They want to be among the sunflowers,” he said. But there’s little room to park on the shoulder of Safari Road, leading to congestion, and near-misses with would-be photographers and speeding dump trucks. Three years ago — the last time crop rotation had the Bogle farm growing sunflowers — the Bogles thought they’d spare their neighbours all the trouble and just open up roughly a hectare on their farm for people to park and take their selfies and pictures. It was enough room for 300 cars, though only 100 cars or so came a day.
This year, with the sunflowers back again, the Bogles opened the parking lot again, charging $7.50 a person (kids under 12 were free) to tour the 1.3 kilometre walking path through the sunflower patch. They started on July 20 when the sunflowers started blooming and for a week it went well.
“Everything was great and then unfortunately, Saturday came,” Bogle said.
Saturday, July 28, the Crazy Day. Around 6:45 a.m., he was out with the dog for a walk when a car pulled up. They weren’t opening until 9 a.m. “Oh that’s a little bit crazy,” he remembered thinking. “Then, you know, we had a couple more.” By 8:30 a.m., there was a line of 20 or 30 cars at the laneway. His 72-year-old father called the police, to give them a heads up that something strange might be happening at the Bogle birdseed farm.
“I don’t know, we just got this weird feeling,” Bogle said.
Bogle opened early to keep them off Safari Road. Within an hour, his 300-car parking lot was full. He looked out from the top of the laneway and there was a line of cars in both directions, running for a kilometre west down Safari. Just to the east of the Bogle farm, Safari Road intersects with Highway 6 — a busy, shoulder-less, fourlane highway. The cars were clogging the highway.
Bogle’s neighbours opened their yards and their fields, charging a fee for people to park, and still it wasn’t enough. Then at midmorning, nature intervened. It rained and people started filing out.
“Everything was looking good,” Bogle said. Then it wasn’t. The sun came back out and the lineups on the road got worse. Bogle saw droves of people coming towards his farm. They had parked on Highway 6 — where there is “zero place to park” — and hundreds were marching along Safari Road for a picture with the flowers.
Police told the Hamilton Spectator that some were crossing the highway with children, some putting their hands up to stop traffic. “But live traffic doesn’t stop on that highway,” Staff-Sgt. Chris Hastings told the Spectator.
“I’ve been describing it as a zombie apocalypse,” Bogle said, guessing that roughly 7,000 came that day and around 1,000 didn’t pay the entrance fee. “One of my neighbours told me that he caught two people going to the bathroom in his front yard in his bushes.”
In the early afternoon, he and his mother were trying their best to clean the eight port-a-potties when one of his eight staff radioed to say the police were at the laneway. After speaking with the Hamilton Police officer, realizing the danger of all the crossings on the highway, the Bogles shut down the sunflower tours, potentially forever.
Still people keep coming — despite the pleas on the answering machine and the website and Facebook page — keen on sneaking into the farm for a photo to post online. It seems, Bugle said, media attention in the weeks before the sunflowers bloomed must have attracted the hordes. The Bogle farm also promoted it on its Facebook page.
But now, pacing the end of his laneway, Bogle is hoping his sunflowers start to drop their petals already. In an interview Tuesday, he stressed one message, over and over: “People, please don’t come.”