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Health & Fitness

Rudbeckia: Common Weed or Plant of the Year?

North American Native Has a Fascinating History

Late summer in the garden is anything but dull thanks to several species of Rudbeckia better known as brown– or black-eyed susans, echinachea and coneflowers.

Their gold and hot-pink petals flare outward from a button-like dark center. Like the daisy, those showy blossoms are really TWO flowers in one -made up of those two different shaped sets of florets.

The giant of the botanical world Linnaeus named the genus Rudbeckia (in the Aster family) for his teacher at Uppsala University, Professor Olof Rudbeck the Younger (1660-1740), and his father, Professor Olof Rudbeck the Elder (1630-1702). Both were botanists. Despite the Scandinavian name, Rudbeckias are  native to North America. A British plant collector was gifted with roots of the wildflower by a French settler in the Americas, which also set off a Rudbeckia craze in England. Native Americans used the plant for medicinal purposes with humans and animals, everything from cures for snake bite to wounds, earaches and stomach complaints.

Rudbeckia's spectacular blooming periods go on and on. They are low maintenance and thrive under a wide range of growing conditions. Still, everyone wasn’t enthusiastic about the adoption of the black-eyed susan as Maryland’s state flower in 1918. Some considered it merely a “common weed.” What clinched the choice was that the plant’s colors were those in the coat of arms of Lord Baltimore, the colony’s founder. On the other end of the popularity scale, the National Garden Bureau website declared Rudbeckia “plant of the year” in 2008.

A classic case, if I ever heard one, that one man’s weed is another’s treasure. Which is partly what makes gardening so personal and so much fun.

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