Giant sunflower reaching skyward

By Deborah Buckhalter

Published: July 7, 2008

Clover Byford inherited a ‘green thumb’ from her mother and grandmother, but her most recent success is way above average, even for her.
The giant sunflower growing in her garden on Deering Street in Marianna is taller than the power line there, and she said it makes her nearly seven-foot-tall grandfather “look like a stick figure” when he stands near it.
Byford and her twin nine-year-old daughters, Jahnay and Ariel Beswick, planted the sunflower from seed about two months ago. They grew more and more astounded as they checked its progress from day to day.
“We have a small yard, and it’s just towering over everything,” Byford said. “I’ve never seen one that tall before in my life. It’s got one next to it which is over 10 feet tall, and that one’s a baby compared to it. I had some last year that I thought were huge – they were up to my chest – but this is really unbelievable. The stalk is bigger than your wrist – my mother couldn’t even wrap her had around it. We not tall enough to measure it, but its got to be one of the tallest.”
Her mother, Esther Brinson, went out to measure one leaf’s length on a recent day.
“19 inches,” she called out to her daughter.
“All of the rest of them are pretty much like that, too,” Byford said of the sunflower’s leaves. “I bought the seeds locally, and we have plants everywhere. We’ve got about 20 smaller sunflowers growing out here. I encourage the kids to plant stuff, so this is kind of fun for us to watch. They help me in the garden, so I guess we all caught the gardening thing from my mother and grandmother.”
Byford, who is in RN school at Chipola, said she didn’t do anything special to the soil when she planted and nothing since, either.
“It’s just plain old dirt,” she said. “The only other thing I’ve put out is the bug control that I treated the whole yard with. I can’t explain it.”