Sunflower

Last year all of my sunflowers died. I started the seeds early and followed all the basic instructions to raise the plants, but as soon as I planted them outside, they all disappeared slowly. Supposedly the bunnies in my backyard love them as salad. This year I promised myself no matter what, my sunflowers would live. From the mistakes of the previous year, I took notes and started my seeds indoors, early. On about five egg containers my little seeds began their lives with a moist touch of soil. I kept them by the window where the sun reaches the most. From ritual watering and motivational speeches, my baby sunflowers started sprouting one by one. It is a joy to watch the seeds sprout with the potential of growing into a forest. I started daydreaming of a walk in our backyard, surrounded by sunflowers.

I am not sure why I suddenly grew this fondness towards this flower. Yellow being the color of joy, sunshine, and spring, I guess I wanted a part of that blessing. Slowly, all five containers filled with little plants. I did not transplant them immediately after they became a plant. Instead, I started leaving them outside for a couple of hours every day. The idea was to introduce them slowly to the environment for them to adjust before planting them. In this course, there was this time when lord Helios was having a bad day, and he took it upon my plants by toasting them within hours! Many of my plants could not take the harsh sunlight and gave up. There was no taking revenge on the sun, so with a heart bitter as an underripe cucumber, I started keeping the rest of my plants in a shaded area. Slowly the plants grew bigger to a point where the egg containers were not doing it for them anymore. I decided to start planting them outside, then.

In our front yard, remains a small memorial garden dedicated to my late father. This flower garden has a mixture of native plants and plants that my father had in his tropical rooftop garden. I planted a few sunflowers there. I also planted a few in the vegetable garden, some scattered here and there and one in my raised bed. I built some fencing around the plants so the bunnies could not get them. I did not have money to buy chicken wires so I chopped branches from backyard trees and positioned them all around the flower plants, handcrafting a fence. I imagine the bunnies laughed at my failed architecture since they effortlessly ditched the fence and ate most of my flowers overnight! My dream of walking in the garden surrounded by sunflowers disappeared in front of my eyes!

Only a handful of my plants remained. I and my husband started working around the clock on these flowers, layer-fencing them, guarding and watering them immensely. During this time, I had to leave the house to go to Pellston for an opportunity at the University of Michigan Biological Station named GLACE. GLACE stands for Great Lake Art Culture and Environment where among many lessons, I learned extensively about indigenous land, plants, and the Great Lakes.

Did you know that sunflowers are native to North America and were first grown as a crop by indigenous tribes over 4,500 years ago? Even at GLACE while blueberry picking or bouncing at the bog, my mind went from time to time to our sunflowers. How big they are now? How are they doing? These are the questions my husband would find me asking him, whenever we talked over the phone. I do have to give credit where credit is due because Debashish did a very good job taking care of all the plants while I was gone. I left a garden with little plants and once I came back all the plants were big, lush, thick, and full of bloom. Our sunflowers had buds showing with a promise of bloom, anytime then.

The assorted seeds that grew into plants finally revealed themselves by blooming. The sunflowers in the vegetable garden were smaller in size. These were honey bear sunflowers which complimented the marigolds planted across them. In my father's memorial garden were Helianthus Sunflowers that grew more than four feet tall and were just by the entryway to our house welcoming guests. We were waiting for the late bloomer that was growing on our raised bed and grew more than 6 feet tall. This one was the most protected so far and is exposed to most sunlight. It was big, fat, and had many buds coming out of it so you can imagine our excitement for the final reveal. I had planted all assorted seeds so we had no idea which flower was which until they bloomed and we were looking forward to it.

During this waiting period, one night we experienced a severe thunderstorm. In the morning my husband called me outside, and I instantly felt something bad had happened! I followed him quietly to the raised bed and I saw the sunflower plant snapped in half and had fallen on the ground! I felt like a hundred needles poking my chest. So, this is it? The plant dies! I don't know if the storm was responsible or the suspicious groundhog that lives in his tunnel under our porch but I was looking for someone to scream at. Months of longing, caring, and manifesting were gone in a day!

Gardening is new to me, I do not know a thing about it. I started planting after my father passed away in April of 2022 to keep his legacy going. Gardening makes me feel closer to him. One of the many regrets I have to live with is that I never took the invitation from my father when he excitedly tried to teach me one or two skills about raising plants. When I was a child, I loved walking around him in his garden while he worked, plucking ripe pomegranate or tomatoes.

I grew up in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, an overpopulated city. Plants are a rarity there, gardening is a luxury, land is scarce and people do not have time to enjoy little bits of life. The city has been taken over by flyovers, traffic, street shops, factories, and thousands and thousands of working people. Still, some people bend the reality to make themselves a rooftop garden. My Baba (father) was one of them. In his rooftop garden, he had zinnias, marigolds, pomegranate, guava, cilantro, spinach, tomatoes, jasmine, hibiscus, lime, cosmos, pepper, mango and many more plants and trees. He had hand-built raised beds that would support bigger trees enough that they would grow tall enough to grow fruits but not too tall. I loved walking in the rooftop garden, it made me feel that I was not in the city anymore but somewhere else; somewhere nice.

I was fascinated by a technique he had where he would grow multiple colored hibiscus flowers from one plant. He would go around the neighborhood and collect branches of hibiscus in all different colors and bring them home. Then he would cut the bottom of the branches in a triangular shape, almost like a fountain pen. Then he would get a primary plant of hibiscus and cut some reverse triangular shapes in the branches of the primary plant. He would do it in a way where, both the primary plants branch and the found branch would fit together like a puzzle. Then he would tape them together. In a month, there will be multiple colors of hibiscus growing from one plant! He called this process “kolom” which translates to pen. I remember it because the cut looked like the tip of a fountain pen. In English, this process is called grafting. It is a simple science, but to me, it felt like magic!

Wait, if a primary plant can support and give life to branches of different hibiscus without rejecting it, maybe I am underestimating the power of plants! Maybe our sunflower plant could heal itself if I follow my inherited instinct. I snapped out of my thoughts and asked my husband to bring me tape. He quickly brought me one. Together we pulled the plant and carefully taped the parts together. Then we added support for it to stand straight.

I do not pray in the traditional sense, I did not pray when a boat flew off a running truck and landed in front of my car flashing my life in front of my eyes! I did not even pray when I had elementary statistics last term! I am lucky that the universe has been kind to me almost always regardless of my lack of gratitude! But I prayed this time. I prayed to the forest Gods for the life of this plant. The next few days, the first thing I did when I woke up was to impatiently check on the sunflower. It was standing but its head full of buds was facing downwards instead of looking up at the sun.

Sunflowers are known for heliotropism, where the plant's leaves orient themselves perpendicular to the sun's rays to maximize the process of photosynthesis. Sunflowers follow the sun from east to west during the day. At night, they reorient themselves to face east in anticipation of the sunrise.

Our sunflower was not showing any of these signs of solar tracking! It was looking at the ground, defeated. For days, the six-foot-tall majesty kept her head down. I almost gave up the thought that the plant would come to life. Human beings give up too easily, maybe plants do not. I know I am anthropomorphic but our sunflower did not give up on us as easily as we did. One morning I woke up to follow my routine to check the plant. Alas! The plant to my surprise was facing the sun! Just from soil, water, sunlight, and love, it was able to heal itself. It was standing straight, announcing the coming blooms of its buds, facing the sun with its full glory. I thanked the flower, I thanked my husband, I thanked the forest gods but I whispered to my Baba who was standing just beside me in spirit, Baba, "Sunflowers will bloom".