Landscape and Lawn Care Advice: Sunflowers Rivaling Cherry Blossoms as Top Plant Attraction by Susan Harris

Here’s why I’m going out on a cherry blossom limb to assert that the humble sunflower is gaining on DC’s most overhyped flowers.

Just outside DC, Maryland’s McKee Beshers Wildlife Management Area is just now seeing its sunflower fields cleared of photographers from near and far.

There’s a special Guide for Photographing the Sunflower Fields. A Virginia camera club has a meet-up there. Washingtonian Magazine calls it “Instagram Gold,” using these two and 10 more shots to prove the point.

But there’s LOTS more here on Instagram itself.

From the Department of Natural Resources we learn that

The sunflowers are planted in nine different fields in spring as a food source for wildlife, particularly Mourning Doves…People come from miles away and plan vacations well in advance to try and catch the view. You can regularly see the fields full of amateur and professional photographers, along with painters. It is quite the sight.

Photo credit: Forsaken Fotos on Flickr

There’s More There

The whole 2,000-acre wildlife manager area is a “mixture of woodlands, fields, wooded bottomland and managed wetland impoundments (green-tree reservoirs).” Never heard of them! But now I know that greentree reservoirs are where “biologists deliberately flood forests during the fall and winter…These attract colorful wood ducks as well as other waterfowl which migrate through or spend the winter here.”

All told, the place “provides habitat for a great diversity of wildlife species including deer, wild turkey, waterfowl, over 200 species of songbirds, and numerous reptiles and amphibians.”

But this bit surprised me: “The McKee-Beshers WMA is a public hunting property and Maryland has a hunting season on Mourning Doves that opens September 1 every year.” People really hunt these guys?