A few weeks before we left for China I pulled up most of the vegies from the garden. I didn’t want our guests to walk out to a garden full of weeds so I scattered flower seeds randomly in the garden bed. Some of these were sunflowers and they sprouted immediately. We saw the first flowers bursting through just before we left.
Our guests tell me that they loved walking out and seeing a patch of bright colour everyday. By the time we got back the sunflowers were at the end of their life so I replaced them with basil, eggplants bok choy and spinach. However, they were not ready to give up the garden totally and soon enough seeds from the old sunflowers started to sprout amongst the basil. I was so glad because I’ve always loved sunflowers.
When I was a child I would plant the seeds in any nook and cranny. Then when the flowers were spent I would dry them out and eat the seeds with my mum. I’m going to try this with poppet when these flowers go to seed.
I love the way the flowers turn with the sun. In fact the Italian name for them is Girasole, which literally mean ‘turn with the sun’. Curiously, they also seem to follow me around. Where ever I go I come across them. Maybe it’s just that they’re common or that they grow almost anywhere or that I notice them because I love them so much. In any case, over the years they have kept me company and cheered me up in my travels.
I took this photo in 1991 in Kwinana, an industrial suburb in Perth on one of my first photographic adventures with poppet’s dad. This was long before digital photography; when you used film sparingly. This was the only shot of the sunflower I took that day and I can still remember the moment the shutter clicked.
When we went to Italy in 1999 we ran into an enormous field of sunflowers driving from Venice to Rome and had to stop and get amongst them. (This is a much younger me.)
I kept seeing them in China but sadly I didn’t take any photos. However, it did make me think about Ai Wei Wei’s installation Sunflower Seeds. I haven’t seen it but the idea of it excites me. The work is made up of millions of hand crafted porcelain sunflower seeds. Apparently, sunflower seeds were one of the few treats during the cultural revolution and friends would catch up while indulging in this simple pleasure. I noticed that this practice continues today in other forms. Once when we went to dinner with a group of friends in Shanghai bowls of sunflower seeds were placed on the table at the end of the meal and everyone began cracking the husks open. It reminded me of my childhood when I would dry out my sunflower seeds and them munch on them with my mum.
I’ve added these links to Ai Wei Wei’s Sunflower Seeds.
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-ai-weiwei-sunflower-seeds
http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/72/SunflowerSeedsAiWeiwei
My Tiny Italian Garden 
