searching for sunflowers in chicago

Lately, I’ve been trying to think of fun, new, random places to go with the family that we wouldn’t normally go to, so after seeing some posts pop up on my feed with sunflowers in the background, I decided to go on the hunt for a sunflower field in our area! I was really hoping to find one relatively close, seeing as I can’t be traveling too far at 35 weeks pregnant, but little did I know, googling “sunflower fields near Chicago” doesn’t exactly produce a list of blooming fields, unfortunately. My first search resulted in a number of flower shops that sold sunflowers, but no full fields.

I continued searching and eventually found a couple of newspaper articles featuring the beautiful sunflower fields at Barrington Hills Farm in Barrington Hills, IL, which just happened to be a short 40ish-minute drive from our house. I contacted the farm and asked if the flowers were in bloom and if they welcome the public to visit, to which I got a prompt reply that the flowers were, indeed, in bloom and to come on over!

We set off Sunday morning towards Barrington Hills, not knowing exactly what we would find, but upon arriving at the farm, we were almost immediately greeted acrross the road by a beautiful, vibrant field of fully blooming sunflowers. There was a small area to pull over, so we parked the car and got out to explore.

There was a hefty rainstorm over Chicago on Saturday night, so the fields were a little muddy and there were no trails, but it was still a wonderful experience to walk through the fields and bask in the beauty of the flowers. It was the most heart-melting experience watching Ivy look at the flowers. She’d never seen anything like it before, and she was clearly in awe. We had to be very careful, as there were lots of bees in the flowers, but she didn’t mind one bit and continued to explore.

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The weather was perfect for the first day of September– slightly overcast and about 68 degrees.

We spent about a half-hour in the field, just wandering and checking out the flowers. Like I mentioned, there were no trails or paths, so it wasn’t the easiest to go too deep in the field, but we were still able to take most of it in. I would definitely recommend wearing pants and closed-toe shoes if you venture out to the field.

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Hopefully, the next time someone is searching for the perfect sunflower field in the Chicago area, they will stumble upon this blog and discover the same beautiful fields we did.

p.s. We put 2790 Spring Creek Road, Barrington Hills, IL 60010, into Maps to find the farm first, then almost immediately saw the field across the road from the Barrington Hills Farm entrance.