_Inula Helenium_
_Flower-heads_--Large, yellow, solitary or a few, 2 to 4 in. across, on
long, stout peduncles; the scaly green involucre nearly 1 in. high,
holding disk florets surrounded by a fringe of long, very narrow,
3-toothed ray florets. _Stem:_ Usually unbranched, 2 to 6 ft. high,
hairy above. _Leaves:_ Alternate, large, broadly oblong, pointed,
saw-edged, rough above, woolly beneath; some with heart-shaped,
clasping bases.
_Preferred Habitat_--Roadsides, fields, fence-rows, damp pastures.
_Flowering Season_--July-September.
_Distribution_--Nova Scotia to the Carolinas, and westward to Minnesota
and Missouri.
The elecampane has not always led a vagabond existence. Once it had its
passage paid across the Atlantic, because special virtue was attributed
to its thick, mucilaginous roots as a horse medicine. For more than two
thousand years it has been employed by home doctors in Europe and Asia;
and at first Old World immigrants thought they could not live here
without the plant on their farms. Once given a chance to naturalize
itself, no composite is slow in seizing it. The vigorous elecampane,
rearing its fringy, yellow disks above lichen-covered stone walls in New
England, the Virginia rail fence, and the rank weedy growth along
barbed-wire barriers farther west, now bids fair to cross the continent.
Black-eyed Susan; Yellow or Ox-eye Daisy; Nigger-head; Golden
Jerusalem; Purple Cone-flower
_Rudbeckia hirta_
_Flower-heads_--From 10 to 20 orange-yellow neutral rays around a
conical, dark purplish-brown disk of florets containing both stamens
and pistil. _Stem:_ 1 to 3 ft. tall, hairy, rough, usually unbranched,
often tufted. _Leaves:_ Oblong to lance-shaped, thick, sparingly
notched, rough.
_Preferred Habitat_--Open sunny places; dry fields.
_Flowering Season_--May-September.
_Distribution_--Ontario and the Northwest Territory south to Colorado
and the Gulf states.
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, 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. Any one 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. The black-eyed Susan, like the English sparrow, has come to
stay--let farmers and law-makers do what they will.