Sunglowered

Not My Sunflowers

This is what my sunflowers should look like by now.

Package with Note: Mid April

And this is how they do look. I bought these seed balls in March as a gift for The Prince who likes them and maintains a (pathetic) strip of a garden along the curb in front of our neighbor Pat's house--she's allergic to gardening and I don't allow him near mine (except when I need him to do something that I don't feel like doing).

See, he has this stingy concept of gardens, giving constipated haircuts to the borders -- a technique he learned on trips to the Jersey shore when he was a kid, spending weeks at the beach with a house full of relatives and toddling along after his Uncle Bus who edged the garden each Saturday morning. He does not share my affinity for the wildly out of bounds, which extends to hair. Specifically mine. But that's neither here nor there.


I bought the package of sunflower seed balls because I was feeling guilty about going to the Philadelphia Flower Show without him this year and he seemed pleased and even made that little note to hisself on the package,
"Mid
April"
and circled it, even.

The directions were so easy and cheerful. Just drop them on the ground and masses of happy sunflowers would be waving at the cars and ambulances and German tourists gawking along the sidewalks...

Except the package disappeared. I handed it to him in the kitchen and in the kitchen it remained. So it wouldn't get lost. It's a funny thing about having a kitchen that is too tight for two and scarcely spacious enough for one that things get so easily misplaced.

Not to assess blame, but it's his fault for deciding to reinvent the entire house this spring when I simply asked him to reinstall a piece of molding that he took down a year and a half ago because he thought there was a mouse hiding behind it and he squirted this plastic stuff that looks like regurgitation into the gap and stuck the molding beside the dining room radiator and. Sigh.

Probably what happened to the seeds was that guests were coming for dinner and I did my little clean-up dance, stuffing things here and there so we looked adult, and this effort would have included this package of seeds that hadn't found a home. So I put them somewhere...

In the following months I occasionally asked The Prince if he'd seen the seeds and he invariably replied, "They're in the kitchen."  And then the thought went the way of the package until several more weeks passed and I asked again.

And then last week I took out the salad spinner and there they were, sitting quietly in the plastic basket, smiling up at me.

Should I plant them now? It's headed for 100 again this weekend with no chance of rain.

The window boxes look good though.

One of Five Boxes, They All Look the Same So.