In the middle of the drought, Jenny Jenner’s husband bought her a bunch of sunflowers from the supermarket.
The Queensland farmer put them in a vase on her kitchen bench, where she admired their thick manes of bright yellow petals and big round faces.
As the Jenners started running out of water during the historic dry spell, this sweet and simple marital gesture changed their luck.
“I thought ’these will be easy to grow,'” Jenner said.
Now one million sunflowers are waiting to burst into bloom on their farm at Kalbar, in the Scenic Rim region, replacing the acres of lucerne they used to grow.
The 22-acre sunflower crop is a few metres from their back door, a constant happy presence.
“They’re just like people: there’s some tall ones, some short ones, skinny ones, fat ones, some that are just special.
“You'd think that because there’s a million they’re all exactly the same, but they’re not.”
The couple is hosting the third Kalbar Sunflower Festival over three days from March 10, an idea inspired by other farmers’ frustrations at tourists trampling through their crops to take photos.
Seeing an opportunity, the Jenners built walking tracks through their field allowing festival-goers to pose for photos, get lost in a sunflower maze and dine and dance through the towering stalks.
“They’re a really happy flower. I’ve never seen anybody leave without a smile on their face,” Jenner said.
The eastern states of Australia will turn yellow throughout February and March, the typical sunflower season. Major commercial crops grow in Queensland and NSW, though farms are springing to life in Victoria and Western Australia too.
According to the Australian Sunflower Association, which represents growers, the flowers were grown for oil and margarine throughout the 1970s, before moving towards monounsaturated oil varieties as consumers became more health-conscious.
The association says there is a growing market here and in Asia for bird seed, livestock feed, confectionary, oils and spreads.
For Victorian farmer Laiken Britt, growing sunflowers is a way to do her own thing on the family’s dairy, cattle and sheep operation at Dunnstown, near Ballarat.
“We have four boys, so I said ‘I’m sick of doing all this boy stuff, let’s grow something for me’,” Ms Britt said.
While some locals laughed at her for growing sunflowers in a climate too cool to harvest the seeds, Ms Britt decided to open the crop to visitors, charging $2 per stem.
Her pick-your-own business attracts huge crowds every season, often mothers and daughters holidaying together, couples celebrating weddings or births and families forging new traditions in a field of flowers.
“It’s the best job you could ever think of,” she said.
“My husband is the blokiest bloke you can imagine and he'll be down there frolicking around, helping the old ladies cut their flowers.
“It feels like a community. They’re real enthusiasts, those sunflower lovers.”
