I am besieged, bothered and bewildered.  A victim of “mission creep.”  There are barbarians at the castle gate.

The sunflowers are taking over.  When I step out on to the front stoop and look to the right, I’m greeted not by the sight of miniature roses and floribundas nestled in cedar mulch, but by the image of a six foot sunflower poised to devour the bird feeder at the end of the flower bed.

It is apparently possible to have too much of a good thing. I never thought that before, although I usually measure “good things” in increments of love and chocolate. Who can possibly have too much of either?

I sit in the shade of a tall tree, laptop balanced on my knees, appreciating from the bottom of my soul the fact that I look out  on a riot of flowers on the west side of my house.  A hummingbird moth darts among the coneflowers, while a hummingbird proper explores the white and purple phlox.  Four years ago, this patch of about 200 square feet was smothered in black plastic held down by a layer of white river rock, a symbolic, depressing testament to a marriage gone south.  There is virtue, sometimes, to be found in hitting the "reset" button in life. To my left now is a bank of butterfly bushes in three shades of purple, punctuated by hollyhocks.  I’m still getting used to the delight.

So far so good.  But out of the corner of my eye, to the right, I can see a rogue sunflower looming ominously over the bird feeder.  I notice that it never follows the sun like the other sunflowers, but instead just stares down at the feeder as if anticipating a meal.   

It is flanked by a cohort of shorter compadres that sprang from beneath the layer of snapdragons I let grow wild with amusement.  In the space of a month, I’ve managed to go from amused to aghast. 

But let’s go back to the beginning.

I have come later in life to the gardening bug, entirely the glorious credit of the man with the Harley, the black leather pants and the longbow.  (Yes, ladies, that sentence still makes my heart flutter…even when he drives up in the Chevy.)  Four years ago, when we first started dating, spring was just around the corner and he set out to transform my drab surroundings into a palette with the floral vibrancy of his own joyously splendid backyard. 

Who knew the cornucopia of emotions and writing inspiration that could spring from that?  Joy, romance, satisfaction, triumph.  A judge who sent my first gardening essay, Wildflower seeds and beer  on to the national level in a writing contest waxed eloquent in her commentary about how she enjoyed the dual tale of the progress of both a garden and a romance.  Good thing she hadn’t read A Day in the Country which preceded the planting of all those perennials, and revolved instead around my hand to hand combat with thorn bushes and wild raspberry canes.  There was the weeks-long Sedum Watch that kept me on the edge of my seat as I coaxed a broken, rootless stalk of sedum picked up at the garden store counter to cling to life and take hold. (It did, and it’s on its third summer now!) And then, inevitably was what I called Un-Gardening, the realization that nature is never static, and some very pretty plants will just take over if you don’t beat them back with a machete or rip them out by the roots. 

The snapdragons this year are a new phenomenon.  They seeded themselves like crazy last fall, spreading out from a two foot stretch that filled in a bare spot between some rose bushes. 

Delighted to find something pretty in my garden that was not only identifiable, hardy, and flourishing but utterly free, I aided in the settlement by thinning out some of the dozens of seedlings and planting them further afield.  They proliferated beyond my wildest dreams. Mostly of a very tall variety, they have left the miniature rose bushes in the dust, so to speak, where they hunker down in the shade of their taller neighbors, hanging on until the first frost lays waste to the flamboyant carpetbaggers.

The sunflowers are an insurgency of a different sort. These are the self-starters, or, as the man with the Harley and the longbow would say, “volunteers.”  And it is an entirely new invasion.

I’ve tried planting sunflowers before.  I’ve started them in peat plugs and planted them in the garden. Something always came along and ate them.  I started them in peat POTS and planted them in the garden. Something came along and ate them along with the dirt in the pot, like they were cleaning out ice cream cups, leaving the cups on the ground like waffle cones after the ice cream has been slurped out.  With rare exception, I’ve given up on “starting” them at all anymore.

The birds and gophers had no such hesitation. This year I bought a new bird feeder, and filled it with black oil sunflower seeds. A hummingbird feeder had hung there the previous summers, attracting hummingbirds and ants. The birds have been less than dainty in their food fights, and scads of seeds have been scattered around the feeder. They were scattered further by the gophers who make holes and tunnels in the yard and run up the rain gutter when they hear Lucky approach. Lucky responds by chewing on the sides of the rain gutter to try to scare them out.  There’s never a dull moment.

When the first little sunflower seedlings sprouted, I was utterly delighted. A week or so later I noticed that further afield in the garden mulch were tiny groups of sunflower seedlings, up to a dozen springing from a single spot. My theory is that the gophers either decided that these particular locations in the cedar mulch were perfect for storing seeds for winter, or that they just spat out the seeds—ptooey!!—to ditch the ballast before running for their lives when Lucky came barreling out the front door in pursuit.  Either way, I laughed with joy at the thought of “sunflower bouquets” at my front door.

I’m not laughing any more!! 

I am surrounded by flowers whose sunny faces look cheerfully amusing from a distance, but up close seem more than vaguely sinister. I felt a slight chill when I recognized that the developing flowers have a lot in common in the “looks” department with that pincer-faced alien in the “Predator” movies.  

I have six-foot varieties sporting single huge flowers atop tall shafts that stand out amid the snapdragons like Clydesdales in a ring of Welsh ponies. And then there are the shorter branching ones, half their size, which resemble deadly Hydras of myth. Myriad blooms sprout incessantly and ehtuiastically from every direction.

It’s halfway through August right now, and soon the birds will have their say, picking the seed heads clean, taking a bit of the menace out of the tall interlopers in the garden. By late fall I’ll have ripped the stalks from the garden and tossed them in the “burn pile.”  And I’ll have the rest of the winter to figure out whether I’m going to give nature a free rein next spring … or just dust off the hummingbird feeder again!