Tribute: Saralee Kunde left a legacy of daffodils

You can’t eat daffodils, or make much of a wine from them.

That Saralee McClelland Kunde would invest so much effort and money blanketing the shoulders of Sonoma County roads and highways with the sunny narcissus said much about the undisputed queen and chief ambassador of the region’s agriculture.

To the dairy girl turned vineyard master, the daffodils were a just-because adornment of what she deemed the best place in the world to grow. At the drop of an exuberant, floppy-brimmed hat, this champion of the land and co-founder of the Harvest Fair would pop corks and celebrate the prime-grade bounty of Sonoma County’s farms and ranches. Her life was a garden party, her table the county’s abundant plain. Of course, she set it with flowers.

“Farming is not only our county’s heritage, it is our identity,” once proclaimed the hard-driving, simply delightful daughter of Petaluma-area dairy ranchers Bob and Lillian “Sweet Lil” McClelland. As a country kid, she showed Holsteins in 4-H competitions and at the Sonoma County Fair and she imagined herself forever, happily producing milk.

The possibility that she would transition from dairy to wine, just as her beloved county did, became an inevitability after she fell in love with Richard Kunde, whose family has worked wonders with grapes in Sonoma Valley for more than a century. Despite the switch, she never stopped loving the cows.

As a team, Saralee and Rich Kunde were unstoppable, irresistible and just terrific fun to be with. They hatched, grew and refined a cornucopia of strategies to advance Sonoma County agriculture and market its products, to encourage an increasingly suburban population to get its hands dirty while exploring the farm life and to expand opportunities for young people to find their joy and future on the land.

Saralee Kunde gave. Her passion for this particular patch of the planet compelled her to pour her abundant tangible and internal resources into endeavors that included the Select Sonoma County marketing initiative, the 4-H Center in Rohnert Park and Russian River Valley Winegrowers.

All through a 15-month, bare-fisted fight with cancer, the ex-farm girl worked and played and applied the full force of her persuasion to inspire others to continue to treasure, sustain and advocate Sonoma County agriculture and those who dedicate their lives to it.

Kunde was just 66 when she died in January. Her legacy endures all around us, for sure in the daffodil bulbs that multiply in the fertile soil of the place she so adored and, year after year, push up beauty for the sake of it.