SunBelievable™: A Sunflower for the 21st Century

Content provided by Monrovia

Okay, picture the happy face of a sunny sunflower popping up in the mid-to-late season garden. Got it? Now, imagine 1,000 of those brilliant-yellow flowers blooming non-stop on a single plant from spring to first frost. Gimme!

That’s SunBelievable™ Brown Eyed Girl Helianthus, a brand new groundbreaking variety we’re introducing this spring. Developed by plant breeders in the UK, with all kinds of cool attributes (see below), SunBelievable™ piles on the prairie charm, but is just as easy to grow as any other annual. If you LOVE sunflowers but wish they could bloom all summer long, it’s time to get excited by this innovative new variety. Let’s dig in!

Sunflowers are typically grown from seeds and produce a tall stalk topped by a few large flowers, or they can be shorter with a number of smaller blooms. SunBelievable™ is different. It’s a brand new hybrid with a  multi-branching, short and compact habit, and because it doesn’t produce seeds, it can put all of its energy into making a constant crop of flowers.

Trials in both the UK and in the US have demonstrated the plant’s ability, given appropriate water and fertilizer, to pump out 1,000 blooms over the course of the growing season. And, unlike the foliage of other types of sunflowers that can get beat up as the season goes on, this plant’s luxurious foliage actually deepens in color with age, so it looks better, longer.

SunBelievable™ Brown Eyed Girl Helianthus has already won several significant international awards. Here’s what makes it so special (and a must-have in your spring/summer/fall garden):

• Produces over 1,000 flowers on each plant during the growing season!
• Flowers continuously from spring until the first frosts.
• Day length neutral so it blooms even on shorter, less bright days.
• Sterile so it puts all its energy into flowering.
• No pollen, but still attractive to bees.
• Heat tolerant – great in pots and full sun, hot, sunny borders.
• Shrubby and compact to 24” tall and 39” wide.

Like you, we treasure the sequence of bloom in the garden that comes from plants that flower at different times through out the season. But, we also love the idea of plant that we can sink into a pot or into the ground, and depend on it to provide the unique delight of sunflowers for a longer period of time. Keeping pollinators happy is also big in our world, and SunBelievable™ Brown Eyed Girl Helianthus is rich with the high-calorie nectar they need, so expect to see plenty of snacking going on.

SunBelievable™ Brown Eyed Girl Helianthus will be available online at shop.monrovia.com and right here at Pahl’s Market this Spring!