Dune sunflower, Helianthus debilis, sometimes can be a victim of its own success. It's showy, tough, and flowers enthusiastically year round in frost free areas. A goodly mound of it, with its bright yellow-green leaves, and undiluted yellow ray flowers ringing purple-brown disk florets, brightens up the garden considerably. It wants no pampering. All it asks is space - and there's the rub.
Space is an increasingly rare commodity in contemporary home sites around here. Lots generally are small, and the houses are built all the way to the 7.5' setback on the sides.( Higher floors sometimes are built all the way out to the property line, curiously reminiscent of medieval street scenes of tall buildings towering over dark, narrow passages).
The plant is readily available, and some people, municipalities and road authorities have planted it to their chagrin. This is a plant that survives on the pure, sugar sand of Florida's beaches, buffeted by salty coastal winds, and subject to extreme drought while in full sunshine. The average yard, even unfertilized and unirrigated, can be an Eden in comparison, and granted this largesse, the plant takes off.
It doesn't grow as fast as kudzu, but over a period of months a healthy plant will overrun anything in its path, and certainly will outgrow a narrow median strip. Judicious pruning will keep it pretty for a long time. It has to be pruned along the edges, not from the middle, or center. Pruning gets trickier once the plant has begun to mound over itself. Its long, creeping branches intertwine, so it's pretty impossible to see what belongs to what.
As the plant tumbles over itself, the higher leaves and stems shade out lower levels. A luxuriant-looking mound, may well be completely bare in the middle, with just a veneer of new growth over a scaffolding of aging, woody, leafless stems. It looks atrocious if it is hedged, which is about all most "mow-and go" yard crews know how to do.
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| Badly "Pruned" Dune Sunflower |
This mounding habit makes it particularly attractive in large pots, from which its flowering branches can cascade around it. Eventually the bottom parts of the stem in the pots get woody and bare, which means it's time to cut back hard or pot up another plant. Dune sunflowers transplant easily if they aren't too big. They also root readily and self-sow vigorously if there isn't too much competition. (I wrote more about the dune sunflower in my blog post of Feb. 21, 2021, "January - Not the Greatest New Year.")
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| All From One Plant, One Pot |
The plant's energetic, uppreaching and semi-vining habit make it an ideal subject for line drawings. I like drawing better than painting generally. Yellow is a particularly vexing hue for me, because it is so easy to "dirty" it with shading, which destroys its luminance unless you get lucky.
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| 1-Line Gesture Drawing; Color Study (Yellow Is Too Light and Greenish) |
Part of the definition of line, as it applies to art, is"...an identifiable path created by a point moving in space."("The Elements of Art," J. Paul Getty Museum website: www.getty.edu/for_teachers/building...lessons).
I love this definition because it also seems to denote the action of a growing plant. Attempting to follow that delightful dance of a plant's characteristic energy never fails to engage me.
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| Dune Sunflower, Pencil Sketch |
Drawing is often frustrating and boring, and it requires hours of practice. But succeeding in capturing movement in the sinuous curve of a stem, or the baroque undulations in a leaf's edge, be it just for an inch, makes all the failed attempts fade into insignificance. I'll never stop trying - and failing - to get there.
Of course, a line drawing cannot capture the entire being of a plant - in this case, the sandpapery texture of its leaves, the range of greens and yellows, its volume en masse, even its "non-fragrant" odor. That is a problem of all 2-dimensional media - it can't accomplish everything in one go. But artists and writers of all abilities attempt to capture and communicate something of the innate "truth" of an object or landscape.
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| Texture- Dune Sunflower |
I looked for answers on "why we draw" on the web, and all I came up with was articles on chemistry - substances produced by the brain that make us feel pleasure and/or reward. But nothing on why one person is compelled to take pencil to paper while another is driven to put in hours learning to dance, make something, design a building, or throw a ball through a net. Apparently the chemicals are the same, and when you get down to it, they really don't tell us much. And why do some of us want to communicate so badly? It's more than what my husband calls, "teaching your grandmother to suck eggs." It's more like a toddler desperately wanting others to appreciate the wonderfulness of his latest toy. Drawing plants, for me, has something to do with joy, with sharing, with gratitude. But basically, I really can't say.