Stalk and Vine

At the far northeastern corner of my little suburban lot, the sunflowers are again rising.  I've been growing them for several years now, and they're a delight.  This year, my little three by eight patch is thick with their rising stalks and greenery, and being the vigorous plants they are, they stand nearly at shoulder height already.  

The flowers are coming.

As plants, my helianthus are a gift to the garden for many reasons.  They're wildly attractive to pollinators, who then grace the flowers of my beans and tomatoes.  Situated right by the sidewalk, their beneficent compound flowers are a clear pleasure to passers by and magic for children.  

Their seeds feed passing birds in late summer, and the occasional odd vagrant.  Even after feeding the birds in an Optimally Poppins sort of way, their abundant seed heads provide ample stock for the next years planting.  That, and their dried stalks become my garden stakes for the next year.

For all of their robustness, sunflowers have a weakness.  They are, in this era of rising winds, vulnerable to the roaring blast of downbursts and squall lines.  In my first few seasons growing them, I'd lose many to storms, to the point where I started supporting them with stakes and lines.  That helped, but it was a little fiddly.

This year, though, I'm doing something different.

From an old dogwood stump, wild grapevines started growing.  Their tendrils snake through the stalks, and in the way of most vines, can threaten to overwhelm the sunflowers.  Left unchecked, the tangle of sprawling, smothering wild grape would easily overwhelm the whole stand of sunflowers.  It'd become a mass of fruitless grape, the leaves intercepting the light, the tendrils strangling the sunflower leaves.  The sunflowers would struggle.

I thought about systematically tearing the vine out last year, as I have with sweet, murderous honeysuckle in the past.

But then the thought came to me:  I could use it.  Useless as it seems, fruitless as it is, it could be helpful.  With regular and strategic trimming, the wild grape becomes something different.  The vines I let grow, and I let them secure themselves to the stalks.

Then, once a week or so, I cut it back, to be sure it's not dominating the sunflowers.

With the wild grape acting as organic support lines, the sunflowers are more resistant to high winds.  The complex matrix of tendrils fasten the stalks one to another, strengthening the whole, and all of them become stabilized by the root system of the grape.  

With a little effort, attention, and some judicious trimming, even wild grapes can serve a good purpose.

There's some comfort in that.