Last year (2020) I planted some sunflowers with the idea of emulating the greatest of all sunflower painters, Vincent  van Gogh and cutting my flowers to paint in pots and vases indoors.

 But the sunflowers didn't know about van Gogh, had never heard about van Gogh, and from the time they were little striplings with their flowers well hidden in a green whirlpool of leaves were calling out to me. "Look at us, are we not already a marvel. Come back tomorrow and we will show you more..."

 And so, naturally, I went out daily to admire them, to listen to their chatter and their songs and shyly at first they began to peep at me. Just a petal or two at their beginning, and then a ring of brilliant soft yellow with another ring behind it, and another...

Soon they were many, a multitude looking at me with their dark faces framed in a circular blaze of brilliant  yellow petals. 

"Soon I will paint you" I thought as I admired them, but they read my mind and clamoured 

"Soon? Why Soon? You cold hearted man. What is Soon to a flower? Paint us now! We live for the day and the hour. Soon means nothing to us!"

And so I began to paint them first in the afternoon and then on another canvas in the morning. As I added day to day they grew wider and heavier and wilder and more unpredictable and bent their large heads down to look at me until they were resting their shaggy yellow manes on the top of my easel.

"Wait for me to finish" I shouted but they were no longer listening, so I went round behind them and pulled them back with straps to gain a few more days of painting. 

By the end of autumn they were leaning sideways and all ways like a defeated army,  but how glorious they looked as they teeter tottered into winter and I continued to strap them upright again so I could paint them.

So I was never able to imitate van Gogh and put my sunflowers into a vase but I don't think they minded that and in visiting their unfamiliar country I learned the sunflower language which would otherwise have remained alien to me.

This language told me that in order to learn you must visit other countries and that in order to understand your own language you must learn a foreign one.