Sunflowers: the clue's in the name. These are sun-loving plants. I accidentally conducted an experiment this year when I was overly hopeful about how much sun my north-east facing fence gets. I planted four sunflowers against the middle of the fence, hoping that they would at least get enough sun to survive if not to thrive. Well, survive they have, but thrive they have not:
Here they are, barely bigger than when I took them out of the greenhouse because I needed the space for something else.
And here are the sunflowers from the same batch of seeds that spent a mere week longer in the greenhouse (sown in a straight line) plus some that self-seeded themselves straight into the ground from last year's crop (the other sunflowers):
The tallest of these beauties are well over six feet (180 cm) tall. And they show strangely clearly where in that bed gets the most sun. Want to check where your garden's fullest sun is? Grow a single variety of sunflower all over it. Want to win a tallest sunflower competition? Pick the absolutely sunniest spot you have. Even within my line of a single variety of sunflowers, the nearer to the house they are, the taller they are.
The plant surrounding the sunflowers is borage. From a distance, it looks like it has fluff instead of flowers, but close up the flowers are tiny blue stars. And these also shot up in this sunny bed, crowding out the squashes I'm growing alongside them. But when they were much smaller, I transplanted a few to behind my shady pond, because I wanted to replace some weeds I'd dug up. They're still alive anda good size for that location, but they stayed tiny:
The lady's mantle, on the other hand, is delighted by the conditions there.
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