"Evelyn McHugh" wrote in message
...
shazzbat wrote:
Don't your kids have sunflower contests in US?

Every summer here in UK the local papers are full of pictures of the
grinning little monsters with sunflowers as tall as the house, staked
with
all manner of timber supports.

Maybe you could market them as world's tallest or whatever. It's one of
the
prime methods of getting kids interested in gardening over here.

If they do that over here, they don't do it around here - I'm in the NYC
suburbs, where kids are too sophisticated to leave home and come in
contact with actual nature not on a GameBoy.

I don't think these are the world's tallest, but they are sure strange.
And BIG. The flowers are not terribly impressive as sunflowers go - they
remind me of the ones sold as cut flowers for arrangements. It's just
that there are so MANY of them on one plant at a time. Most of them
start with three or four topmost buds open at first, and as the season
progresses, keep opening new side branches with new flowers.

I gotta post some pictures somewhere. It's not easy to explain them. I
could almost see them as a cultivare for the sheer number of cut blooms,
and cutting them does not seem to slow down the parent plant a bit. The
birds seem attracted to them more than regular sunflowers, too, probably
because they get good protection by the foliage when they are feeding
off the seeds on the spent flowers.

Yes, please do, I'd like to see them. I had one went bananas a couple of
years ago and produced loads and loads of heads, but only at about 4ft tall

Steve ( I still think you should work on the kids)