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This pretty native of the Eastern U.S. has earned a favored place in many of our home gardens, because it grows easily, spreads easily, and tolerates heat, dry and poor soil. Near Asheville, you can find it growing wild, from low roadsides to the high open sunny woodlands of Craggy Gardens.

Even if you aren't the household gardener, you can still easily distinguish it from other yellow composites by two characteristics: it has a deep brown raised cone, and the entire plant is very hairy.

Black-Eyed Susan grows in a dense cluster of stalks springing from the base - each stalk carries many sessile, alternate leaves, but only one blossom at its tip. There are no basal leaves. Each leaf is as hairy as the stalks, oval shaped, and mostly without any detectable teeth or serration. The blossoms consist of 10-20 (usually 13-15) infertile ray flowers, and a very 3-dimensional (as tall as it is wide) center of dark brown fertile disk flowers. The rays do not have any notches at their tips. The plants average 18"-24" in height.

There is only one other local, native member of the Coneflower genus that looks like this one : the Thin-Leaved Coneflower (Rudbeckia triloba) - but the Thin-Leaved is an airy, many-branched, entirely smooth plant with smaller, flatter flowers.