Most people are familiar with the perennial yellow coneflower or black-eyed Susan(Rudbeckia fulgida). It’s a tough, cheery-looking garden perennial that has earned a place in native gardens, wildlife gardens, and just plain hot, dry difficult sites. Here’s something just a bit different. Like its tough little relative, Giant coneflower (Rudbeckia maxima) is a native perennial with seeds beloved by finches and other songbirds. But once this one starts to sprout in the springtime, it’s like it forgets to stop! Glaucous bluish leaves give rise to vertical stems that keep growing and growing straight up. Seven feet later, a familiar-looking yellow flower with a green cone in the center pops open, ready to do what coneflowers seem to be good at: producing nectar for bees and butterflies and making birdseed. Here at the Garden it is planted in the Sunken Garden area at the base of Hosta Hill, near the Japanese Garden. You can also see it from the big windows in the hallway outside the Eleanor Squirres Library. We think of it as a seven-foot -tall birdfeeder that we don’t have to refill.

Tags: native plants, wildlife gardening

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Ann McCulloh, Perennial, Summer Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.