by Karen Williams
In the summer there are wild sunflowers growing all over southern Utah and I love them! They grow along the trails and roads of Zion which reminds me of a favorite passage I read as a kid in My Antonia by Willa Cather.
"Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs's story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom."
I read this book before I had ever seen the sunflower lined roads in Utah, and it came to mind the first time I saw the roads in the summer with bright yellow flowers as far as the eye could see.
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