On a warm morning downtown, Bud Benton seems to be the most popular man at the farmers market.
It’s the last week of April, and his first weekend at the market since Thanksgiving. His blue T-shirt sticks out in the ocean of yellow at his stand. Benton owns Mon Jardin Farms in Batchelor, where the primary crop is sunflowers.
Today, vendors and customers alike light up at the sight of him. It’s hard to tell which they are more excited to see: Benton’s sunflowers or Benton himself.
“You’re back!” they exclaim, launching into pleasantries about each other’s families. Benton is on a first-name basis with the market’s regulars. Some have been buying his flowers for decades.
“Flowers make people happy,” he says. Not everyone likes vegetables—which Benton also grows in small quantities—but sunny yellow buds brighten everyone’s day, he says. It’s why he’s been growing the flowers since the mid ’90s, longer than some of his younger customers have been alive.
On a typical Saturday, Benton arrives downtown in the wee hours of the morning, long before the market opens. He and his team haul white and blue buckets filled with water and stems.
In the back of his stand, an assistant slices the tall stalks, which can sometimes tower up to 10 feet high. Taped to the stand are handwritten signs announcing prices: $10 for a bunch, or 3 bunches for $28.
On weekends with good weather, Benton usually sells out of all the flowers he brings. But there’s always more where that came from: On any given week from May through November, his farm is home to several thousand flowers. In addition to the Red Stick Farmers Market, he supplies sunflowers to local florists and grocery stores.
Once the season picks up, Benton adds mixed bouquets to the lineup, incorporating zinnias in shades of fuschia, red and pink.
Benton is in his late 70s now, and his business seems to be going strong. For years, he says, people have been telling him sunflowers would go out of style soon. It’s a fad, they’d say, warning him to get ready for the next thing.
But on Saturday mornings downtown these days, it’s still easy to spot who has been to the farmers market: Many of them are toting sunflowers purchased from Benton. breada.org
This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of 225 Magazine.
