At the start of summer, I thought I would put aside my disdain for amaranth — so coarse, so Victorian — and grow whole stands of it so that I might condescend to change my view of this seedy annual.
Instead, the amaranth spurned me. No wonder people also call it love-lies-bleeding. The tiny black grains of amaranth seed germinated in their pots, but they never seemed to develop beyond a nascent stage, to a point where I could transplant them. I had started them too late, and the strangely dry July didn’t help.
I consoled myself by planting other heat-loving annuals: tithonias, zinnias and good old sunflowers. All three are doing quite nicely, which may have something to do with their natural kinship. All of them are part of the vast flower tribe known as composites. These daisies form the largest family of flowering plants, containing as many as 32,000 species. The amaranth family, by contrast, has just 800. Take that, amaranth.
Botanists call the composite family Asteraceae. Yes, asters are part of the clan, but no single species projects its bold iconography more than the annual sunflower, outlandish in its size but plain and honest in its form. It is a flower a child can understand. I shall never forget my first glimpse of a sunflower field in the south of France, countless thousands of seven-footers whose happy faces moved with the sun.