Lawrence Hall, HSG
Midsummer
Sunflowers
Colonel
von Luger: “Fliers are gentlemen, not peasants to dig in the earth.”
Group
Captain Ramsey: “The English have always been very keen on gardening.”
Von
Luger: “Yes, but flowers. Is this not so?”
Ramsey:
“You can’t eat flowers, colonel.”
-The Great Escape (1963)
But of course the seeds of some flowers are edible. Now
that we are at the summer solstice the sunflowers are ripening quickly. Mine
are a great success, the third crop of native American sunflowers I planted
last year. The package I bought from CowCreek.Com (or something like that) contained
15 or so different varieties of real sunflowers in all sorts of colors,
presumably much as the First Nations cultivated them.
I planted zinnias, the spouse-person’s favorites, in a
parallel plot but they and the sunflowers have become great friends and share
the patch. They have required lots of watering this year, but together the
sunflowers, zinnias, and to a lesser extent the tomatoes make a colorful show.
The peppers gave it up early.
Even now the sunflower heads are maturing into seeds and
in the next week or so – I don’t want to rush them – I will begin harvesting
them and storing them in the refrigerator in paper bags. The birds will
certainly enjoy a feast, but many seeds will fall to the ground for the second
crop. When both the sunflowers and zinnias are pretty much gone in July I will
mow everything down and then simply wait for the second crop. Unless there is
an early freeze that second crop will be just as beautiful when autumn comes.
The bees are happy and I have a fine crop of tree frogs,
very useful little creatures and reportedly reliable biological markers: if you
have bees and tree frogs you have good air, soil, and water.
This week is the summer solstice, also observed on St.
John’s Day, which is also known as Midsummer Day. The eggheads time the arrival of summer to
the hour, although any schoolchild knows that the first day of summer is the
first day after school lets out. Functionally this week is midsummer, when the
sun is at its apogee and the daylight hours at their longest. Our nifty little
solar system will slowly, slowly begin altering the courses of the planets and navigating
toward the winter solstice and the Nativity six months from now.
The ancients sorted all this out with their observations
of stars and shadows and the Great Dance (C. S. Lewis) of the planets from
pyramids and ziggurats in the Middle East and stones planted on Salisbury
Plain. We don’t have to eyeball the sunlight through Stonehenge or climb a roof
in Israel to track the stars; all we need do is call up one of the weather
applications on our MePhones to note the changes.
Just now a cold front would be the most welcome seasonal
marker of all.
And Colonel von Luger was wrong: gentlemen dig in the
earth.
-30-
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