I’m not one to complain about the weather, but blimey! Isn’t the weather rubbish?

In fact the weather has been rubbish all through the year. From an April that brought us unusually high temperatures and sunburn through to a July that brought severe flooding and mass homelessness, this year’s weather has been officially pants and has been a whole bunch of no good for my sunflowers.

Having sown the sunflower seedlings in their tiny little pots and watched them slowly grow, I finally got to plant the sunflowers in June, placing five flowers in the back garden and three in the front. Suitably fed and watered by my caring yet clumsy hands, the flowers started to grow gaining substantial height in almost no time at all.

Almost immediately the country was battered with severe gale-force winds. Thanks to the gales I lost a couple of sunflowers, the strong winds snapping the plants in two as if they were twigs. Replacement plants were bought, plants already a month or so into the growing process, and were planted into the spaces left by their wind-damaged forefathers. With everything back in order, I was a bit miffed to find that a few days later another severe gale damaged the plants again.

So I repeated the replanting cycle again. In response to my efforts, the weather repeated its let’s-blow-a-huge-bloody-gale-on-Nigel’s-garden cycle and destroyed the plants yet again. So I gave up on the replanting and left the remaining flowers to grow, certain that the winds would return and destroy the whole crop.

The winds never returned. Instead the country was treated to severe flooding, flooding so bad that whole towns were cut-off and thousands of people lost their homes. Luckily I was unscathed by the floods, in fact the constant rains added life to the soil and saved me the hassle of watering the garden.

Which leads us to now, August/September, a pair of months with weather so grey and bland that the sunflowers flowered, looked up for sunlight, and upon not finding any decided to wither away and die. The flowers in the back garden that is. The two remaining flowers in the front garden have survived the ravages of the English weather and just sit there, waiting, waiting for those few moments of sunshine that will inevitably appear. In November.

These are the sunflowers in the back garden. They are of various types whose names I bothered not to learn and therefore flowered at different times. The flower at the back I have christened ‘Gigantor’ due to its impressive 2.5 metre height.

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