It's Sunflower Season!
Aside from those prints of Van Gogh’s sunflowers that we all bought at the “move in week poster sale” on the university quad thinking they would make us instantly sophisticated and interesting, sunflowers were never on my radar in any significant way. But in the late summer of 2020 when we were still doing the pandemic (unlike now, which is more Pandemic-Lite), I started noticing images of sunflower fields all over my Instagram feed.
I scrolled through picture after picture depicting rows of bright yellow flowers set in sweeping vistas against summer sunsets blazing golds and magentas. Well good for you, California or Belize or wherever it is that sunflowers grow in such lovely, perfect crowds. Must be nice, I muttered huffily before firing up season one of the Great British Baking Show for the seventh time. Then I noticed the location tags: Rhode Island, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts. What? Really? You sneaky hussies, I thought. Right here in my own back yard this entire time!
A quick Google search for “sunflower farms near me” turned up Verrill Farm, a family owned and run farm in Concord, Massachusetts, about 20 minutes from my house. At that point most places were still very much shuttered. People poured into parks and nature preserves and just about any outdoor situation that was available. I wasn’t any different. I was just as eager to get as much mental distance from everything going on as possible and to find other places to be besides the grocery store and my house. They had COVID protocols in place: masks, timed visits, reminders to distance. Money from tickets went to benefit a local hospital and included the option to pick up to five sunflowers. Add to cart, please. Best ten bucks spent all of that goddamn miserable year.
Verrill Farm was a 2020 highlight for me. I know, this is not saying much considering the bar that year was set somewhere around the sub-basement of Hell. But because of that first experience, I’ve made a trip to the farm during sunflower season one of my favorite, must-do, summer traditions. It is simply impossible to be glum or pensive or anxious standing in the middle of these gangly beings with their cheerful round faces adorned in bright manes of yellows and golds and burnt umbers. It can’t be done and I am more than happy to die on that hill.
Fortunately, the vicious drought that gripped New England this summer didn’t seem to rattle the sunflowers. In fact, in a lot of places around the town where I live, sunflowers have been the last blooms standing, resilient hold outs where even hydrangeas had given up in surrender to the punishing heat.
Each season growers at the farm plant four to five varieties of flowers in a field that is mid-sized, divided into several neat grids with a wide empty swath in the middle and a clear track around the perimeter. An old tractor hunches down in a corner of the field, one of those “accidentally on purpose” props that invites people to climb on and pose. Busy pollinators swarm the flowers, tickling their faces turned eagerly to the sun. I haven’t ventured further than the edge of the field and can already feel a sense of peace and lift settle over me.
The sunflowers run together in narrow rows, which forces you to carefully pick your way up and down the different sections. To me, this is the genius of Verrill Farm’s sunflower fields: there is nothing else to do here but stroll, meander, wander. There are no hay rides. There are no merch booths or games or demonstrations like the ones you’ll find in popular New England apple orchards or as I like to call them “pick your own cider doughnuts and, possibly, apples.”
It’s a place made for gazing around, for letting the quiet rustle of leaves and persistent chorus of humming bees gently break over you. The flowers nod atop their slender stems drowsily as if to say give yourself a break and move slowly here. And that’s what I do. I wander around the rows the way tipsy people weave around bar stools. I stop and return the stare of a yellow cyclops for slightly longer than is comfortable for either of us.
Every few feet I creep up on a particular flower, looking closer. I stick my face as close as I dare to one of those bees skittering around the sunflower in her yellow “pollen pants,” and I take a few seconds to wrap my mind around this ordinary extraordinary spectacle that is the real time evidence of nature’s incredible machinery, operating for a billion years and counting. Here. Literally right in my face.
I notice what I notice with the eyes of a child. The sunflower’s circular design, so joyful in its simplicity, begging to be drawn by young and old hands alike. How the edges of the flower’s petals look like individual flames or that the dark center of each flower contains thousands of individual stamen resembling stars. An entire galaxy cradled by each sunflower, millennia in the making, that we glimpse for a few precious weeks at the burnt out end of each summer. Worth the wait.
Sunflower season.
