SUNFLOWERS A SHADY IDEA
Each time I find myself in front of two particular houses in my neighbourhood, I wonder about the lives of the people inside. These are homes whose front windows face me directly when I approach a stop sign at a street’s end, before turning right or left. Both homes are close to the street, fully exposed to lights from cars stopping directly across from them.
Over the years, a laurel hedge has grown and filled in to screen one of the homes. The other house was sold early in the spring. Soon after, a hedge of young evergreens appeared across the front of the property. It will be a few years before the plants fill in and grow tall enough to form an effective screen.
To create a more immediate and substantial, if temporary, barrier to car lights shining directly into the front windows, the owners planted sunflowers behind the young hedge. The sunflowers grew quickly into tall plants with an abundance of large leaves — an ingenious screening for the summer and through the fall until frost.
I’m often asked for ideas on plants for summer screening, to hide unwanted views or to create areas of shade from the hot sun. A neighbour has demonstrated that sunflowers can do the job beautifully. Screens and fillers. A perennial that I grew from seed and transplanted into the front garden in early summer is another flowering plant that can serve admirably as a screening or “filler” plant.
I found Rudbeckia triloba (three-lobed coneflower, many flowered coneflower, brown-eyed Susan) in the Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalogue, where it is described as a “productive filler flower” with wiry, well-branched stems bearing many small, bright yellow, daisy flowers with dark centres that have an iridescent violet cast in sunlight.
A native of eastern North America, R. triloba is an easy growing, substantial filler or background garden plant as well as a provider of numerous stems to serve as “fillers” in cut flower arrangements.
As a species, rather than a named, cultivated variety, R. triloba is variable. Different plant and seed sources will offer varying strains of the species. My plants have formed sizeable, two-metre-wide bushes, with the tallest, centre stems rising to almost 180 cm.
Britain’s Chiltern Seeds describes the plants as 150 cm tall. Heritage Perennials, wholesale provider of perennials to our local garden centres, in their publication Perennial Gardening Guide gives the height as up to 100 cm.
Though native to moist areas of eastern North America, the plants have proved remarkably drought tolerant in my garden this summer. They are strong plants, still loaded with bright daisy flowers. I made daily stops at the plants through the summer, to watch in quiet delight as bees worked the blooms.
I’m hoping the plants live up to their reputation as self-sowers. I’d like young plants to fill in odd corners of the garden and to plant along garden edges and in front of fencing. They would also be excellent summer screening and providers of light shade.
The Perennial Gardening Guide author notes that he first became aware of R. triloba while visiting gardens in Germany, where he often found the plants combined with soft blue Michaelmas daisies.