The Popular Fall Flower That Is Actually Self-Seeding

There are very few things more satisfying in a garden than plants with breathtaking blooms, especially if those blooms have the ability to reseed and grow by themselves. Apart from making your job as a gardener a million times easier, these plants also fill in the empty spaces in your garden and make it feel lush. This fall, it is time to add your favorite sunflower to that short and coveted list of garden beauties. These vibrant, heliotropic plants will stun you with their enchanting inflorescence and also pleasantly surprise you next season by popping up at random places!

Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), one of the most popular flowers across the whole country, are fairly easy to grow and can adapt to a variety of soil types — be it clay, sandy, loam, or silt – as long as it is not waterlogged. They are hardy in USDA Hardiness Zones 3 to 10, thrive in full sun exposure, and can grow up to 16 feet tall. Sunflowers bloom from summer right into fall, and in potted form, can also help attract more birds to your apartment balcony. But what sets them apart is their low-maintenance requirements and the ability to grow themselves again without human intervention.

For thousands of years, the self-seeding ability of sunflowers, alongside other evolutionary advantages such as their height, have allowed them to not only dominate landscapes with their presence but also become a favorite among gardeners. The sunflower head, which is technically a cluster of thousands of tiny single florets (that's right, those little inner discs are actually flowers!), contains both the male and the female parts. These parts can affect pollination, and with a little bit of help from either a pollinator or the wind, they can form hundreds of seeds by themselves. 

In fact, if you pay close attention to the flower head, you will realize the genius and art that hides behind the sunflowers' method of maximizing seed production by packing them all in the center. Their interlocking, spiraling pattern, following the mystical Fibonacci sequence, is an evolutionary developmental mechanism to maximize packing efficiency without compromising growth or light absorption for the florets. What this basically implies, is that all you need to do is plant them in your yard and they will gladly take over from there. The fertile seeds will break off one by one from the central composite flower, fall on the ground, and new plants will emerge from those spots to constantly fill your garden with smiling blooms.

Although sunflowers take care of the majority of the gardening work load for you (making them the perfect plant for beginner gardeners to grow), there are still some boxes you should keep checked to make sure they grow well. For instance, they still need a drink about once a week to grow formidable roots, and if you're living in a particularly hot and dry region, you should increase this frequency. Apart from that (and the full sun of course), these garden gems are not too finicky about their needs. They do not require any extra fertilizing either. However, some varieties can grow very tall, and you should use bamboo stakes to prevent them from being damaged by the wind or breaking under their own weight.

The idea of new sunflowers plants springing up in the garden every year can be highly attractive, but if you consider the self-seeding aspect a bit too unruly for your liking, you can also grow some male-sterile varieties that will behave themselves, since they do not produce any pollen or seeds. These include cultivars like "Buttercream," "Bashful," and "Claret," which are pollenless, and therefore, will also spare your whites the characteristic bright yellow stain. Moreover, you can also deadhead the flowers to prevent the plants from self-seeding.