Sunflower with leaves line design

She dug holes between the bollards and the lobster pots and dropped the seeds in one at a time, pressing each with her thumb. Her mother had told her that the sun went down behind the headland every evening, and that a sunflower growing with its face to the sky would know the way home before any lamp did. Nobody in Porthgwidden had ever tried it. Salt, they said, would kill anything.

The first heads broke through in April, pale green and then suddenly taller than the children who came to stare. By midsummer they stood in a crooked row, each great face turning slowly from east to west, and the leaves unfurled broad and curling like the hands of someone waving from a long way off. Boats that had been out past the reef began to find the channel in the dark, steering by the yellow crowns against the last of the light.

Maud never went to sea herself. On the evening the Ellen Vosper came limping round the headland with a split sail, she was sitting on the wall with her back to the water, peeling a seed head with her fingers. When the men climbed up the steps they found her asleep among the stalks, the sun long gone, the flowers still turned towards the place where it had been.