Here comes the sunflower !
It’s time for late-summer annuals, and none are more showy than sunflowers, says Monty Don
AS SUMMER moves into its second half I rely on the half-hardy and tender annuals to provide colour and form. The most dramatic of all late-season annuals — and one of my favourites— is the sunflower.
The knee-jerk response to sunflowers is the child’s drawing of huge plants topped with flowers as big as dinner plates radiating petals like the sun. These are fun to grow, especially for children, and I love them. ‘Russian Giant’ is an old favourite, guaranteed to grow exceptionally tall, but stake it early and well otherwise it will inevitably crash to the ground. Often this will not damage the plants, but they very quickly turn to find the sun and start growing with a crick in their neck so that when you right them again they are permanently bent.
When it comes to selecting the colours of sunflowers I find that the velvety rusts, plum, burnt orange and browns that you find in varieties like Helianthus annuus ‘Prado Red’ and ‘Velvet Queen’ add a luxurious richness to a border that exceeds any other plant in late summer.
VELVET Queen’ remains my favourite, but then she was the first that I ever grew. Each flower is not huge but the size of a good saucer and comes in colours ranging from deep crimson through a burnt orange to brown with golden points of pollen dotted about the centre.
‘Claret’ and ‘Prado Red’ are both remarkably similar, with a plum undertone to their light-sapping colour. In the shade they are darker and can seem to be almost brown. The ‘Prado’ series has masses of flowers and is practically pollen-free, which means that you do not get the staining if you brush against it.
All these dark sunflowers have long been essential components of the Longmeadow Jewel Garden borders and work well with the late-summer palette of crocosmias – especially the orange ‘Emily Mackenzie’ – as well as the large range of marmalade and plum-coloured heleniums, red dahlias, bright orange tithonias and humble calendulas. At the other end of the spectrum, I like the pale varieties such as ‘Vanilla Ice’ or ‘Moonwalker’, as well as the perennial sunflower ‘Lemon Queen’ with its mass of delicate miniature sunflowers. Sunflowers respond to dead-heading (removing the spent blooms) by providing waves of smaller flowers. ‘Velvet Queen’ is naturally multi-headed, like a great set of candlesticks two metres tall, but others that instinctively produce one dominant huge flower will produce extra shoots at the junction of leaf and stem if you keep cutting off the flowerheads.
I stop dead-heading from the middle of September so that the birds have something to eat. The finches love them, clinging to their centres and greedily pulling out the seeds from their individual compartments as they store up body fat for winter, and I have seen a crow trying to copy this, balancing with all the grace of a drunkard walking a tightrope.