Brown-eyed Susan

Three to five months of continuous orange flower production and reliable self-seeding that keeps the colony going year after year with no planting work.

Brown-eyed Susan is the prolific, branching Rudbeckia that covers itself in hundreds of small orange-yellow flowers from July through frost. While Black-eyed Susan makes individual blooms you admire, Brown-eyed Susan makes a cloud of them: the three-lobed leaves (which give it the species name triloba) and freely branching habit produce a mounded plant absolutely covered with two-inch flowers that bloom in continuous succession for months. The effect at full bloom in August is one of the most exuberant displays in the native plant garden. Technically a biennial or short-lived perennial, Brown-eyed Susan maintains itself reliably in the garden by prolific self-seeding. Once you have it established, it will return each year from new seedlings, the definition of a garden plant that handles its own succession. It's taller than most garden Rudbeckias, reaching three to five feet in rich soil, and the dark-centered flowers hold on the plant for months before transitioning to seed heads that feed birds through winter. Plant it in a mass at the back of the border or allow it to naturalize in a meadow.