On the west end of Napanee on Dundas Street, a stone’s throw from the Lennox and Addington County General Hospital, a small house sits back from the road, with a driveway nestled between two carpets of sunflowers.

The drought hasn’t been kind to the front-yard flower field, which declines gently from the road. The blooms turn their faces to the sun, as their genetics tell them to do, but they struggle to crane their necks, and the stems are thin and dry.

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“Boy, I was scared this year,” Dave Manion says, surveying his 2025 crop.

The field of flowers is self-seeding, coming up every year on its own for decades. The flowers were from seeds that were purchased by Manion’s mother, Kathleen, years before her death in 2012, and they grow today on the property where she raise

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