Beach Sunflower

Need a plant for a horrible and sun-baked part of your yard? Beach Sunflower.

Need a plant that will tolerate high salt content because you live by the ocean? Beach Sunflower.

Want a Florida native plant that blooms nearly all year, can tolerate the worst growing conditions, re-seeds itself and is beloved of wildlife? You guessed it: Beach Sunflower

Beach Sunflower (Helianthus debilis) is a lovely Florida native that can be found in coastal regions north to the Carolinas and west to Texas. As the name suggests, Beach Sunflower does well at the beach and is regularly used for beach conservation and to prevent the erosion of sand dunes.

Beach sunflower is highly drought tolerant and in fact prefers hot, sunny and well drained sandy soils. This flower begs for the placement in a yard where nothing else seems to want to live.  Plant a few and next year you will find double the number of these sunflowers returning to your yard. A prolific re-seeder, Beach Sunflower will be a long term resident of your yard.

Too much yellow in the yard? Look for Italian White Beach Sunflower (Helianthus debilis subsp. cucumerifolius) which blooms with gorgeous pale yellow to white blossoms and grows up to about 5 feet in height. Take a look at the photo to the right and you can see the pretty obvious white sunflower blooming in the middle of its yellow cousins. If you want to see a mass planting of these sunflowers, come over to MOSI and check out the Richard T. Bowers Historic Tree Grove which is currently awash with the yellow of Beach Sunflower.

In the coldest part of the year Beach Sunflower will finally stop blooming and sometimes even die back to the ground. No worries. Year and year this sunflower will be right back. You can cut the plants back to the ground with no concerns for the survival of this species in your yard.

What’s in a Name?

The genus Helianthus is a compound of two Greek words helios or “sun” and anthos which means “flower”. The specific name, debilis, comes from the Latin for weak or frail. Interestingly I haven’t managed to find many weaknesses in this species. If you try to pull a large plant out of the ground, branches often snap off rather than the plant releasing from the soils.

A Dash of Poetry

To have gold in your back yard and not know it. . .
I woke this morning before your dream had shredded
And found a curious thing: flowers made of gold,

Six-sided—more than that—broken on flagstones,
Petals the color of a wedding band.
You are sleeping. The morning comes up gold.

excerpt from the poem Tom O’ Bedlam among the Sunflowers by Thomas James