Hi, I would like to trade for your snapdragons and red sunflowers. I have some perenials including Purple Liatris. Gaillardia, Shasta Daisy, and Coneflower. I also have other things as well such as Zinnia, Cannas, Black eyed Susan. Let me know if you want to trade. you can E-Mail me. As far as the lavender goes, perhaps you should look into winter sowing. There is a forum on GW and they all seem to have very good success with things that are a little more challenging to grow. Good luck. Amy

How cool, Emily! My little plant in the gutter turned out to be just a weed. LOL. Glad to see your plant is nicer than mine. Enjoy! :) Dee

Hi, Sunflowers cross pollinate very easily. In fact to get pure seed without keeping the flowers bagged, you need a few miles of separation. So you will probably get a mix different looking flowers next year. I can't say for sure what you'll get from your seeds, but I've found red sunflowers have dark seed hulls. Remy

Thanks for your comments garden friends. I think I have found an explanation to this strange behavior. A little googling confirmed my suspicion that just like marigolds the sunflowers too are composite flowers. Composite flowers are combination of many florets having different petal shapes. The florets are divided mainly in two groups, disk flowers (very tiny petals) in the center and ray flowers (much bigger petals) surrounding the center, which in combination give sunflower (or other composite flowers) it's final look. As they are all individual flowers, seeds collected from different zones will result in different shape of flowers (I remember reading this somewhere many years ago though in context of marigold). I am assuming the teddy bear sunflower has very low number of disc flowers as compared to Ray flowers which is why they look so full and fuzzy. But in my seed packet atleas one viable seed of disc flower was there which I happened to germinate and grow. And that explains the strange looking flower on plant 3, it's comprised only of disk flowers. I'm still not sure seed from which part results in a daisy like flower as on plant 4. But atleast now I have explanation behind the different appearances :) the seed companies should be more careful in collecting seeds from composite flowers I guess.