The Best White Sunflowers to Grow in Your Garden

White sunflowers have become increasingly popular for their elegance, beauty, and ability to complement a summer garden with a restrained color palette.

I’ve always loved planting easy-to-grow sunflowers in my garden. They bring such a cheerful look to our yard right at the end of the season when a lot of other plants can start to look tired and worn out, and they can be a helpful distraction if your weeding routine has been less than perfect. They just steal the show in the best way possible. The only problem that I’ve had with growing sunflowers is that I don’t particularly love the traditional orange and yellow tones that you often find in sunflower blooms. Actually, if I’m being honest, I love abundant, saturated colors in other people’s gardens, but in my own, I prefer to stick to blue (or purple) and white blooms. This growing season, I decided to try adding a row of white sunflowers to my garden to see if I liked them as much as I thought I would, and the results have been so lovely. If you like the idea of trying white sunflowers in your garden, too, here’s what you need to know.

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Are There Any Pure White Sunflowers?

There are three common white flowering sunflowers that you’ll find available to grow from seed. “White Nite” sunflowers have a dark brown, nearly black center, and “White Lite” sunflowers have a large mustard yellow center. “Italian White” sunflowers are similar to White Nite in that they have a dark center, but the center section is quite a bit smaller, and the bloom petals are longer, giving the blooming sunflowers a bit of a fancier, frillier look. Italian White sunflowers also have more of a branching growth habit than the other two varieties.

All of these varieties will bring eye-catching beauty to your gardens and borders, but none of them is truly pure white. These “white” sunflowers are, in fact, the palest buttercream color, but still a lovely addition to any late summer planting scheme.

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How Big Do White Sunflowers Get?

These sunflowers were developed and cultivated primarily for the cut flower market, so the stems stay relatively short at a manageable five to six feet at the tallest. You won’t find any white sunflowers with towering stalks reaching twelve feet or higher like some of the giant tall plants. If you’d like to create a strong impact in your garden and have the flowers be visible from a distance, consider adding them here and there to your raised beds to give them a little bit of extra height. These annual flowers make a cheerful addition to brighten the corners of a raised vegetable bed or even tucked in with bedding perennial plants like coneflower, daisies, coreopsis, lilies, and grasses in a cottage garden of wildflowers.

I would love to see white sunflowers potted in big planters as well. They would be an eye-catching way to frame a garage door or a sunny front porch.

The blooms on the White Nite sunflower variety shown below reached a diameter of about six to eight inches, including center and petal length. This variety is perfect for creating showy flower arrangements in a vase or combining with other summer-blooming cut flowers in a floral arrangement or bouquet.

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Growing Requirements, Flower Care, and Harvesting Tips

Ornamental white sunflower cultivars are generally easy to grow whenever they are planted in full sun, but I ran into a few issues with one of our early-summer successions this season not germinating fully after it was sown in our flower garden. Often, with some of the easiest varieties, you can plant sunflower seeds any which way and have seedling germination without issue, but these need just a bit more attention. Be sure not to sow these seeds too deep in the ground; about a half inch into the soil is an ideal planting depth. You’ll also want to be sure to water the seeds frequently after planting rather than just leaving things to chance. A good watering every few days will get them going nicely. Our first succession was so successful that I was more neglectful with the second, and those seeds did not germinate nearly as well.

Once these sunflower plants come up and become established, they’re quite vigorous growers, drought tolerant, resistant to weeds, and happy in different types of well-drained soils as long as they have sunlight and water once a week or so. One thing about this upright sunflower cultivar that I found really interesting is that, unlike other fast-growing golden-yellow sunflowers, these don’t seem to follow the sun throughout the course of the day, but rather, the blossoms face the direction of the sunrise and stay facing that direction throughout the growing season.

If you plan to display your white sunflowers in a vase in your home, it’s best to harvest them the way flower farmers do. A flower grower or a local florist who needs sunflowers harvested for their flower shop will cut them just as the petals become visible but before the blooms are fully open. Once the blooms open, these botanical beauties attract quite a bit of insect activity and attention from pollinators like bees and butterflies, and any imperfections created by these insect interactions are quite visible on the delicate, pale petals.

Or you can leave the sunflowers to grow and feed the birds with their seeds in autumn after the foliage dies back, which is what I usually do.

See also: Step-by-Step Guide to Planting Sunflower Seeds

Finding White Sunflower Seeds to Grow in Your Garden

I live in a rural area where growing fields of sunflowers is quite common, but I did not have any luck finding a packet of white sunflower seeds early in the season at any of my local nurseries and garden centers. Most local seed sellers will typically stock the most popular, easiest-to-grow varieties of flower seeds for your particular USDA hardiness zone and the preferences of local gardeners, so you may find that white sunflowers are a bit too much of a specialty item to buy locally and you may need to order them online as I did.

Aim to purchase from a reputable seed seller if you can. Most seed retailers seem to carry one type of white sunflower but not all three, so you may need to shop around if you want to try a few different types in your garden. My White Nite sunflower seeds came from Veseys here in Canada, which is always a reliable source of good seeds for your garden. I saw that Floret in the US caries white sunflower seeds as well.

Have you ever tried growing white sunflowers? Which variety is your favorite?