People are posing nude amid sunflowers!? We ask KC area farmers for the naked truth
A farmer in Great Britain has made international headlines because people are posing naked in his field of sunflowers.
The news made Leavenworth farmer Jacob Thomas laugh out loud.
Has he ever caught folks in the buff among his blooms?
“Fortunately not,” laughed the owner of JET Produce and Meats.
It’s the question of the moment for farmers like Thomas who grow the flower — Latin name Helianthus annuus — in the Sunflower State. They report this is not a trend on this side of the pond and if it was they would not encourage it. They run family businesses, after all.
Thomas’ typical visitors, he said, are moms and their kids. They go to see flowers, not fannies.
News outlets from CNN to The New York Times have spread the story this week of Stoke Fruit Farm, off England’s south coast, and its recent plea on Facebook.
“Reminder to all we are a family area and please keep your clothes on in the sunflowers! We are having (an) increase of reports of naked photography taking place and this must not happen during our public sessions please!” the farm begged in its post.
Farm owner Sam Wilson told CNN he’s had about six cases of people posing naked in the sunflowers this season.
“We’ve always had people take risque pictures but this is the first year it’s been a problem, which is why we’ve put signs up,” he told CNN.
He posted one of those caution signs with a red slash mark. It shows a hand dangling a bra and the caption: “no topless.”
Grinter Farms, the larges sunflower field in the Kansas City area, is expecting blooms in early September. But they aren’t expecting nudity.
“To our knowledge, we haven’t had naked posers in the sunflower field,” Kris Grinter, who runs the farm east of Lawrence with her husband, Ted, told The Star Thursday. “That being said, the UK story is everywhere, so we may get some copycats this year.
“Heck, if I was my lovely young self, I might be tempted.”
Sunflowers, Thomas said, “are just so shiny and fun that it makes you happy and I guess some people are just happier without clothes on.”
The most “unique” photo he’s ever seen taken with his sunflowers happened this year. A woman from India posed in traditional garb “and it was just stunning and beautiful to see her with the purple dress on, against the yellow flowers.”
His sunflower season finished up last weekend, He was busy with a customer at his farm market when he took the phone call from The Star. He told his customer the newspaper was calling about someone naked in a sunflower field.
“And they want to know if it was you?” the customer asked him.
Giggling girls
Jay Shively runs Berry Hill UPick Farm in Berryton, Kansas, right outside Topeka. Two of his sunflower fields have peaked and have been mowed. But a third should be bursting with blooms by the end of September, shortly after he opens Sept. 23 for the pumpkin season, he said.
Has he ever caught anyone au naturel in the flowers?
“Not technically,” he said.
Shively recalled one night in 2018, just a year after he and his wife opened their farm. It was getting dark and he heard “some girls giggling” in one of the sunflower fields. He could see flashes of light in the darkness so he knew they were taking pictures.
“Just the way they were giggling, I knew something was up,” he said.
They later tagged the farm on Instagram. From their post he deduced they were University of Kansas students and one had posed topless, holding his bodacious, big-headed sunflowers to cover her chest.
He didn’t really care, he said, because there was no one else around. But his sunflower fields are so small there would be no way of getting away with that during the day, he said.
“But that’s been 2018 and I haven’t seen anything like that or heard anything like that since,” Shively said.
Why are people ‘stripping off’?
There is little evidence on Instagram that a trend is afoot, suggesting the British farmer’s experience is an anomaly. Most of the Instagram images that pop up of naked people with sunflowers were created for commercial use.
The go-to-pose is strategically holding the flowers to hide bare breasts. (Some varieties with larger heads seem more suited for the task.)
No one has ever asked local professional photographer Merry Ohler to do a naked photo session in a sunflower field. Not that she would.
She specializes in senior and family portraits, but sunflowers are one of her favorite subjects to photograph. She has devoted an entire page to her sunflower work on her website, MerryOhler.com.
People around here “have fallen in love with sunflower photo sessions,” she writes there.
But, she told The Star, her subjects are always clothed.
She created her own family tradition around the flowers. Before the beginning of each school year she rousts her two children out of bed before dawn and heads to the sunflower fields at Grinter Farms to watch the sun rise over the flowers. Naturally, she documents the moment.
(Grinter reports on Facebook that its sunflowers, planted in mid-July, should bloom around the first part of September and typically last two weeks.)
Ohler said she doesn’t understand this whole get-naked-in-the-fields thing, unless there is something enticing, exciting about flowers that live briefly, a fleeting photo opp.
“I don’t know. Maybe that’s what people are thinking,” Ohler said. “Sunflowers are beautiful, sunflower fields are beautiful. But I don’t get the whole stripping down … ”
Maybe, Shively said, people are so overwhelmed by the beauty that famously inspired artists like Vincent van Gogh that they simply can’t help themselves.
“Maybe being out in nature and it’s pretty and they feel pretty, they get a little more risqué, I guess,” Shively said. “I guess more people feel free when they get out in the wild.”
Please keep your clothes on
Farmers and photographers warn about the inhospitable reception awaiting anyone who walks, stands or otherwise moves around naked in a field of sunflowers.
The fields are dirty and dusty and get muddy after rain. (Why do you think you don’t see many brides in white dresses posing in a sunflower field?) The prickly hairs on the stems are scratchy.
And the bees!
“There are tons and tons of bees out there,” said Ohler. “I would not take anyone allergic to bees out there. I tell my clients if they have any kind of allergy they need to bring appropriate medication.”
Thomas, the farmer in Leavenworth, warned about bugs, too.
“Sunflowers are host to a lot of insects, and so some of those insects will maybe sting or bite you,” Thomas said. “Definitely lots of bees, but also things like grasshoppers can bite people if they so choose. And praying mantis.”
Shively said he would probably reject a request to pose nude in his fields, “unless we figured out some date and time the public wouldn’t be there.
“And I don’t even know then. I’d probably have to talk to my wife.”
