Cappuccino Rudbeckia Seeds

When our director of seeds took her European tour to find the newest and best flower and vegetable varieties, she knew before she got out of the Amsterdam airport that Rudbeckia Cappuccino was going to be one of them. The advertising campaign launched to announce this Hungarian-bred, French-grown black-eyed Susan is tremendous, and for once, the plant not only lived up to its hype but far exceeded it. Let's just say it before we go any farther—this is the best new flower to grow in your perennial border, bar none.

The blooms are huge by black-eyed Susan standards—4 inches across, easily. They sport petals divided into golden-yellow and mahoganhy-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 Susan's 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. And the best part? You'll see the first blooms just 80 to 90 days after sowing the seed. Gardening just doesn't get any easier or better than this.