So very many weeds having come to our Eastern shores from Europe, and marched farther and farther west year by year, it is but fair that black-eyed Susan, a native of Western clover fields, should travel toward the Atlantic in bundles of hay whenever she gets the chance, to repay Eastern farmers in their own coin.Do these gorgeous heads know that all our showy rudbeckias - some with orange red at the base of their ray florets - have become prime favorites of late years in European gardens, so offering them still another chance to overrun the Old World, to which so much American hay is shipped? Thrifty farmers may decry the importation into their mowing lots, but there is a glory to the cone-flower beside which the glitter of a gold coin fades into paltry nothingness.Having been instructed in the decorative usefulness of all this genus by European landscape gardeners, we Americans now importune the Department of Agriculture for seeds through members of Congress, even Representatives of States that have passed stringent laws against the dissemination of "weeds."Inasmuch as each black-eyed Susan puts into daily operation the business methods of the white daisy (q.v.), methods which have become a sort of creed for the entire composite horde to live by, it is plain that she may defy both farmers and legislators.Bees, wasps, flies, butterflies, and beetles could not be kept away from an entertainer so generous; for while the nectar in the deep, tubular brown florets may be drained only by long, slender tongues, pollen is accessible to all.Anyone who has had a jar of these yellow daisies standing on a polished table indoors, and tried to keep its surface free from a ring of golden dust around the flowers, knows how abundant their pollen is.There are those who vainly imagine that the slaughter of dozens of English sparrows occasionally is going to save this land of liberty from being overrun with millions of the hardy little gamins that have proved themselves so fit in the struggle for survival.As vainly may farmers try to exterminate a composite that has once taken possession of their fields.
Blazing hot sunny fields, in which black-eyed Susan feels most comfortable, suit the TALL or GREEN-HEADED CONE-FLOWER ORTHIMBLEWEED (R.laciniata) not at all.Its preference is for moist thickets such as border swamps and meadow runnels.
Consequently it has no need of the bristly-hairy coat that screens the yellow daisy from too tierce, sunlight, and great need of more branches and leaves.(See prickly pear.) This is a smooth, much branched plant, towering sometimes twelve feet high, though commonly not even half that height; its great lower leaves, on long petioles, have from three to seven divisions variously lobed and toothed; while the stem leaves are irregularly three to five parted or divided.The numerous showy heads, which measure from two and a half to four inches across, have from six to ten bright yellow rays drooping a trifle around a dull greenish-yellow conical disk that gradually lengthens to twice its breadth, if not more, as the seeds mature.
July-September, Quebec to Montana, and southward to the Gulf of Mexico.
TALL or GIANT SUNFLOWER
(Heliainthus giganteus) Thistle family Flower-heads - Several, on long, rough-hairy peduncles; 1 1/2 to 2 1/4 in.broad; 10 to 20 pale yellow neutral rays around a yellowish disk whose florets are perfect, fertile.Stem: 3 to 12ft.tall, bristly-hairy, usually branching above, often reddish from a perennial, fleshy root.Leaves: Rough, firm, lance-shaped, saw-toothed, sessile.
Preferred Habitat - Low ground, wet meadows, swamps.Flowering Season - August-October.
Distribution - Maine to Nebraska and the Northwest Territory, south to the Gulf of Mexico.
To how many sun-shaped golden disks with outflashing rays might not the generic name of this clan (helios = the sun, anthos = a flower) be as fittingly applied: from midsummer till frost the earth seems given up to floral counterparts of his worshipful majesty.If, as we are told, one-ninth of all flowering plants in the world belong to the composite order, of which over sixteen hundred species are found in North America north of Mexico, surely over half this number are made up after the daisy pattern (q.v.), the most successful arrangement known, and the majority of these are wholly or partly yellow.Most conspicuous of the horde are the sunflowers, albeit they never reach in the wild state the gigantic dimensions and weight that cultivated, dark brown centered varieties produced from the COMMON SUNFLOWER (H.
annus) have attained.For many years the origin of the latter flower, which suddenly shone forth in European gardens with unwonted splendor, was in doubt.Only lately.it was learned that when Champlain and Segur visited the Indians on Lake Huron's eastern shores about three centuries ago, they saw them cultivating this plant, which must have been brought by them from its native prairies beyond the Mississippi - a plant whose stalks furnished them with a textile fiber, its leaves fodder, its flowers a yellow dye, and its seeds, most valuable of all, food and hair oil.Early settlers in Canada were not slow in sending home to Europe so decorative and useful an acquisition.Swine, poultry, and parrots were fed on its rich seeds.Its flowers, even under Indian cultivation had already reached abnormal size.
Of the sixty varied and interesting species of wild sunflowers known to scientists, all are North American.
Moore's pretty statement, "As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets The same look which she turn'd when he rose,"lacks only truth to make it fact.The flower does not travel daily on its stalk from east to west.Often the top of the stem turns sharply toward the light to give the leaves better exposure, but the presence or absence of a terminal flower affects its action not at all.