Rudbeckia Cappuccino

Cappuccino is an over-the-top beautiful Rudbeckia, with so many merits you won't believe it's in the same family as "plain old" Black-eyed Susan! The blooms are huge by Black-Eyed Susan standards -- 4 inches across, easily. They sport petals divided into golden-yellow and mahogany-red, all surrounding the familiar dark brown to black center. Long-lasting on the plant or in the vase, they are like mini Sunflowers, radiating warm color and, in the garden, bringing butterflies in by the dozen.

Unlike older Rudbeckias, this plant isn't one-tenth blooms to nine-tenths foliage -- it's compact and very well-branched, just 18 to 20 inches high and an amazing 14 to 16 inches wide. Yet more flowers crowd into this space than you'll find on Black-Eyed Susans twice its size! Cut all you like -- this is a cut-and-come-again plant, so the faster you remove the flowers, the quicker the plant sets new buds. (Deadhead the spent blooms if you aren't cutting them, unless you love, as we do, the sight of the bare black cones in autumn, their seed-filled centers providing a feast for songbirds!)

Cappuccino blooms nonstop from late spring till mid-fall in most climates -- three long, luxurious, colorful seasons. Very few plants can equal that kind of bloom strength, and almost no other perennial -- for this is a long-lived adaptable perennial, hardy from one end of the country to the other, guaranteed to succeed even in less-than-perfect soil if pampered the first season. You don't need one whit of gardening experience to grow armloads of these designer blooms on the very first try!

And these plants are very uniform, so if you group several together for an eye-popping display, they will all be very close in size and bloomtime. Well-branched, they just keep coming even through summer heat waves and short dry spells. All this strength comes from their breeding -- they are tetraploids, meaning they have twice the chromosomes of other Rudbeckias, which translates into better performance over their long and happy lives. Gardening just doesn't get any easier or better than this! Zones 3-9.