I learned something recently from Ron Finley, the Gangster Gardener. He said that if you have soil that’s been poisoned, by lead paint falling off of your house or some other happenstance, hope isn’t lost. To reclaim it, you can look right back at mother nature to one of her brightest and most recognizable children:
The sunflower.
The sunflower, it turns out, is a righteous fixer. If they had a nickname, you could call them “the cleaner.” They suck up toxins directly from the soil. Even in extreme circumstances, like at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
After the meltdown at Chernobyl, sunflowers were planted around ponds. At Fukushima, there’s been over 8 million sunflowers planted in the surrounding area since the 2011 disaster. Each day, little by little, a bit more radioactive material is pulled from the soil.
The radioisotopes in the soil mimic some of the nutrients that sunflowers take up normally, like potassium and calcium. As the plants grow they themselves become radioactive, and are harvested and replanted prior to sprouting seeds that could spread the radioactivity to birds and other animals.
Pretty amazing to think that in the aftermath of such incredible disasters, sunflowers are one of the best restoration options. Nature is wild.