BRIGHT and beautiful
Plant a riot of rudbeckias if you want your beds bedecked with brilliant yellow blooms, says Monty Don
THIS is the season of ochres, sepias, caramels, oranges and yellows. Heleniums, tithonias, sunflowers, helianthus, echinacea and coreopsis all provide elements of this range of colours but at the yellow end of this palette none stands as tall nor shines as brightly as rudbeckia.
I’ve grown a lot of annual rudbeckias — which are much smaller than their perennial cousins — including R. hirta ‘Gloriosa Daisies’ and R. h. ‘Cappuccino’. With the latter I sowed two packets of seed which gave me hundreds of vibrant flowers that start out pure yellow and then take on a velvety-brown stain to their outer petals. The great thing about annuals is you can place them as part of a mixed border wherever there are gaps, so you can effectively paint with them, using their colours to enhance, complement and contrast with your permanent planting of perennials and shrubs.
There’s a wide range of annual rudbeckias. ‘Cappuccino’ is lovely, as are the almost orange ‘Irish Eyes’ and the darker ‘Nutmeg’ or the mixed ‘Rustic Dwarfs’. They are half-hardy so seed should be sown in trays or pots in spring and the plants pricked out into individual pots to develop into strong plants before planting out in June or July. They are tough and thrive despite neglect; once planted out after the last frost they need no attention at all.
PERENNIAL rudbeckias are among the most accommodating of all herbaceous perennials, growing in almost all conditions, although they do best in full sun and in soil that isn’t too dry. They suffer from very few ailments and consistently produce glorious flowers in the range of yellow to orange from late July right through to November. All are characterised by a prominent central boss or cone that is either green or brown. They are very closely related to echinacea, although rudbeckias tend to be longer lasting, spread more readily and all in all are easier to grow. They do hybridise — the ‘Summerina’ series are a cross between rudbeckia and echinacea that are fastgrowing like rudbeckia but with the extra hardiness of echinacea.
R. fulgida has a very black central boss. It grows best in soil that does not dry out, though the
variety deamii is more droughttolerant so is ideal for drier soils. ‘Goldsturm’ is the most widely available variety, with lovely eggyolk yellow splaying from its central boss.
R. fulgida is rhizomatous, which means it will gradually spread, but is easy to lift and divide in spring every few years to create both more groups and more vigour within individual plants.
Rudbeckia laciniata is a tall plant with stems reaching 2m high in my rich soil. The leaves are deeply lobed and the flower heads have petals that hang like deflated shuttlecocks with the cones held high. ‘Herbstsonne’ has single flowers with an attractive green cone. ‘Goldquelle’ has bright yellow double flowers, looking rather like a very tall, bright yellow marigold.
If you find that R. laciniata is growing too tall for your borders, you can curb their height and at the same time promote extra flowering by pinching or cutting off the growing tips when they reach about 60cm tall.
This will be some time around the end of June and before they begin to flower.