Sunflower colony
A colony of sunflowers, Helianthus annuus. Click for a more detailed view.
What is it about people who prefer a stubblefield to a piece of land covered with plants? When I returned yesterday to the bit of prairie I visited on May 17 and wrote about in the post entitled “Sunflower’s New Leaves,” I found that some nefarious entity had mowed down the young sunflower plants I’d photographed, along with everything else adjacent to them. Inexplicably, just a little further south, no mower had chanced to go, and there I found the gorgeous colony of fully flowering sunflower plants shown here. Though fields of cultivated sunflowers have their charm, they’re missing the appealing wildness of a colony growing by the rules, or lack of rules, of nature.
© 2011 Steven Schwartzman
(Look here for information about Helianthus annuus, including an enlargeable map showing where the species grows.)
Portraits of Wildflowers 
[…] on some of the sunflowers in the prairie colony I visited two days ago I found several lady beetles, also known as lady bugs (though they […]
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June 18, 2011 at 6:33 PM
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July 4, 2011 at 1:43 PM
[…] Sunflower colony […]
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July 29, 2011 at 6:12 AM
What an extraordinary image, Steve – I had to look closely to convince myself that it was a photo rather than a painting. This goes far beyond representational image and into evocative art. Congratulations and thank you for sharing this on your 25th anniversary post.
composerinthegarden
August 8, 2012 at 7:35 AM
Thank you, Lynn, for your congratulations and for appreciating this image, which I put up after just one week of blogging. Yours is the first comment about the photograph that anyone has ever left.
Steve Schwartzman
August 8, 2012 at 9:38 AM
Well, it certainly deserves a wider viewing! I really liked your idea of a 25 image retrospect; a good technique to get new views for early posts that didn’t get the attention they deserved.
composerinthegarden
August 8, 2012 at 10:13 AM
I’m with you that “it certainly deserves a wider viewing!” I was fascinated by the chaos and energy of this sunflower colony. For whatever reason, I didn’t see anything nearly as good in this year’s sunflower groups. Either it didn’t happen, or I wasn’t in the right place at the right time.
As you point out, I made sure in the retrospective to include pictures from the early days when not many people were visiting this blog.
Steve Schwartzman
August 8, 2012 at 10:32 AM
[…] you compare this picture to the many you’ve seen here of common sunflowers, Helianthus annuus, and Maximilian sunflowers, Helianthus maximiliani, you may be able to tell that […]
A different kind of sunflower « Portraits of Wildflowers
October 30, 2012 at 6:15 AM