Rudbeckia triloba: Flower Spotlight
This article comes from our series of flower spotlights, which are adaptations of the newsletters we send to members of our flower share throughout the season. You can see more spotlights by heading here.
Rudbeckia triloba, brown-eyed susan
Rudbeckia triloba are perfect for floating in bridal bouquets!
Masses of yellow stars
This floating, small-flowered daisy is a long-lived perennial, giving us stems from August through frost. We start ours early in the season, planting them out around equinox with the rest of our rudbeckias. Plants we are harvesting from in 2023 are second- and third-year, and are giving us mounds of golden shimmer. They self-seed like crazy every year, so we just let them be. We leave the ball-shaped seed heads standing in the field over winter as bird habitat and something pretty to look at.
Carl Linnaeus named the genus Rudbeckia after his teacher and good buddy Olof Rudbeck (1660-1740), an ornithologist and botanist. Triloba refers to the deeply notched leaves, which are often divided into three separate lobes.
Olof was a Swede who explored the northern reaches of his country, called Lappland, to describe the flora, fauna, and people. His many paintings of birds are less technically superb than, say, Audubon, but they still accurately describe the bird and give a sense of its character and personality.
An Olof Rudbeck painting of a gray heron. I kind of love it.