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Morgan, Riley and Barney Malone stroll among sunflower stalks at Denver Downs Farm in Anderson, S.C.
Photo by Nathan Bingle
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More than 75,000 flowers in 10 varieties grow in Denver Downs’ 6-acre sunflower field, drawing thousands of visitors each summer for the South Carolina Sunflower Festival.
Photo by Nathan Bingle
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Denver Downs Farm grows on land that has been passed down through four generations, with the Garrison sisters and their families sustaining their agricultural heritage. From left, James Davis, Catherine Garrison Davis, Garrison Smith, Lee Garrison Smith and Ron Smith are framed by the farm’s sunflower bounty. A third sister and co-owner, Elizabeth Garrison Raser, is not pictured.
Photo by Nathan Bingle
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Chris Gill, co-owner of Little Cane Creek Farm and cofounder of the South Carolina Sunflower Festival, demonstrates how to care for cut sunflowers.
Photo by Nathan Bingle
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As part of its agritourism pull, Denver Downs has added numerous family-friendly attractions, including the 250-foot Mega Slide Mountain.
Photo by Nathan Bingle
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Riley Malone poses among the sunflowers, a popular place for pretty portraits.
Photo by Nathan Bingle
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The 2026 South Carolina Sunflower Festival at Denver Downs Farm will take place July 11–12 and 18–19.
Photo by Nathan Bingle
In the morning, before dawn breaks, the sunflowers face east, waiting for that bright yellow orb to rise so they can chase the sun across the Southern sky.
The ground is a wet brown from rain the night before. The sunflower field is green, a gentle sway in the stalks. The smell of growth pervades the field. Inside one of the petals, a bee is at work. One variety of the flowers, standing over 6 feet in height, blazes a red bloom. To the east, where there were once woods, the land is now scalped as new development encroaches.
In its own way, Denver Downs Farm is chasing light, seeking a path to honor its past but also ensure the farm endures and doesn’t succumb to the scrape of a developer’s grader. Others are doing the same, even as farmland shrinks in the Palmetto State year by year.
“For 150 years, we’ve always had to evolve,” says Catherine Garrison Davis, whose great-grandfather saved the money he earned working in a cotton mill in 1869 to buy 200 acres near Anderson, off Old Generals Boulevard. “Agritourism is working right now and allowing us to continue our farm heritage. We’ll keep doing this until it doesn’t work, and then we’ll think of how to continue that farm heritage.”
For now, making it “work” means growing sunflowers. Lots of them. More than 75,000 flowers sprout over the 6-acre field from 10 varieties with names such as Zohar, Firecracker, Desert Sun and Rouge Royale. The farm is a canvas of deep green splotched with a dizzying kaleidoscope of orange, red, yellow and gold wrapped around a rich brown center.
“We’re always looking for what’s the best use of our land,” Davis says. “We’re very proud of our farm heritage. It was special for us to grow up on a dairy farm and to know that our grandparents had roots here. We want to keep it in agriculture moving forward.”
The cult of sunflowers
The South Carolina Sunflower Festival attracts thousands to the Upstate each summer, with visitors from 30 states and five countries, says Chris Gill, an original founder of the event.
“There is a cult following among sunflowers, more than just about any other flower out there,” Gill says. “There’s just something about them that people look at and they smile.”
Gill is part-owner of Little Cane Creek Farm in West Union, along with Pat Williams. In the early years, they focused on corn mazes to bring people and revenue to the farm. But when Williams pitched a festival celebrating sunflowers, Gill was quick to agree.
“People will spend big money on sunflowers,” he says. “And it just took off.”
fter hosting the event for several years, they partnered with Denver Downs, which had more land and better accessibility than their locale in the mountains. And the event has grown each year.
The festival holds a special meaning for Gill.
“My grandmother had cancer back in 2014 before we had started the festival. I’d always get her sunflowers at the store, brighten her day. She just really enjoyed it,” he says, pausing to look out at the field of flowers, thinking of his grandmother.
“She smiled to the end,” Gill says. “It’s those emotional connection pieces that allow us to go back to those special moments in our lives. Everybody’s got a story, and we get to hear that story here.”
Give-and-take with Mother Nature
Williams pauses to catch his breath beneath a canopy. It’s mid-June, the first day of the 2025 festival, and he’s been on the run since early April when he first put seeds in the ground. He knew the early planting date was a gamble with the threat of a late frost, but he feared more the heat of summer, which would keep crowds away.
Some 60 days later—even with a cloudy, wet May—Williams was blessed with a full field.
“Anybody can grow a sunflower, but a good-looking, healthy sunflower is tricky,” says Williams, who talks of amending and enhancing the high-phosphorous soil, increasing the organic matter and loosening the compacted ground. “It’s a give-and-take with Mother Nature. Good soils are getting harder and harder to find because many of our good soils are ending up in subdivisions.”
Williams, who lives in Walhalla and is a member of Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative, was raised in agriculture and now raises calves to send to the next spot in the market. His grandfather had a farm just 10 miles from Denver Downs.
“The Lord has blessed me richly,” he says, adding that farming “can be stressful at times. … But once you get on a tractor and get going, it’s the greatest.”
The switch to agritourism
The Garrison girls—Lee Garrison Smith, Catherine Garrison Davis and Elizabeth Garrison Raser—are fourth-generation owners of the farm along with Lee’s husband, Ron. They’ve shepherded the transition of their 140-acre property from a dairy farm to a regional attraction.
“It still feels like a family farm,” Smith says, “but the agritourism has allowed us to continue making it as a farm.”
Where there once was a hay field, there are now jumping pillows, a zip line, a track for pig races, a hay barn, a paintball course, a bubble-making barn and pits filled with corn. At the top of the hill is a 250-foot-long slide where you can reach up to 35 mph going down. There’s live music and a barbecue restaurant.
Six people work the farm full-time, joined by nearly 120 part-timers in the busy season in the fall. The farm hosts an autumn pumpkin festival, along with a corn maze and hayrides and bonfires. In the spring, they celebrate Easter, followed by the Sunflower Festival come around mid-June or July, whenever the sunflowers hit peak bloom. Several thousand people visit the farm each festival weekend throughout the year.
The Garrison girls don’t have to look far to see where they’ve come from. Across the street from Denver Downs is their family’s homeplace that dates back to 1869. There’s an old mule barn, a log cabin built in the 1700s and an old carriage house. Magnolia trees planted by an uncle stand tall. The vines their mother put in the ground still produce muscadines. There were once peach and pear trees, but only a fig tree remains, still bearing fruit.
Their father, T. Ed, was a World War II veteran, ag teacher and state lawmaker who ran one of the largest dairy farms in Anderson County. Their mother, Juanita, wrote gardening books and had a column in the local paper. And she was ahead of the agritourism movement, hosting schoolchildren on the farm in the 1960s.
Inside the home, where Davis now lives with her two sons, visitors are offered a glass of sweet tea while seated around the kitchen table. Her momma’s wallpaper from the 1980s remains. Her father’s desk from the state Senate sits beneath photos of T. Ed and Juanita with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and ticket stubs from the Clinton inauguration. Photos abound, and there’s a certificate honoring the Garrisons as the 1976 Farm Family of the Year in South Carolina.
The Garrison girls believe their parents would be proud of what they’ve done. Smith tells of how their mother, who died in 2019, thought it was important for people to know where their food comes from.
“She would say, ‘When I’m not here, y’all go on with your life. I’ve had a great life, and y’all need to have a good life yourselves,’” Smith recalls. “She would be so happy and proud with what we’re doing.”
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Keep your flowers fresh
Once you’ve cut your sunflowers, get them in water and in cool conditions.
“It’s about like you and me. When they’re out in the field, they like it to be nice and hot and sunny. But when they go home, they want to sit in the AC,” says Garret Alexander, a volunteer at the South Carolina Sunflower Festival.
About every two days, pull your flowers out of their container and put them in a kitchen sink full of water. Use a pair of kitchen shears to trim the stems under the water. Then, change out the container water, adding a little bit of sugar, and put the flowers back in their container.
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2026 South Carolina Sunflower Festival
When: July 11–12, 18–19
Where: Denver Downs Farm, 1515 Denver Road, Anderson
More info and tickets: denverdownsfarm.com