The seed catalogs are starting to trickle into my mailbox. Soon I’ll have to decide what seeds I’m going to order for next summer’s garden. The process would much easier if I hadn’t slacked off on writing notes in my garden journal over the summer. And I’m horrified that I fell behind on sorting through all the photographs I took. As a result I have 138 GIGABYTES worth of digital files staring me in the face!
One plant that’s still fresh in my memory is the new F1 hybrid rudbeckia, ‘TigerEye.’ It grows 16 to 24 inches high and is bred for multiple blooms on each stem. It’s supposed to be resistant to powdery mildew.
Our relationship got off to a great start. ‘TigerEye’ was easy to sprout, and shocked me by being one of the very first annuals to bloom in my garden. Most of the rudbeckias in my garden wait until mid-July to strut their stuff, but ‘TigerEye’ starting flowering in mid-June.
Because I had high hopes for ‘TigerEye’, I stuck it in quite a few flowerbeds throughout my yard. The plants were beautiful for several weeks, and then I started seeing signs of trouble. Some of the stems turned brown and shriveled up. Then random flowers started to wilt and die. This didn’t happen to ‘TigerEye’ in one flowerbed, it happened in all of them.
By August, most of my ‘TigerEye’ plants had completely withered and died. To make things more interesting, all my other rudbeckia cultivars had a spectacular summer.
I wondered if perhaps they were more sensitive to air circulation. My mom and I are “plant crammers.” You don’t see ever see a bare patch of soil in our gardens. If something dies, we immediately fill the space with something else. Perhaps ‘TigerEye’ developed a nasty case of claustrophobia.
I think not.
At the end of August, I saw this planting of ‘TigerEye’ rudbeckias at Boerner Botanical Garden near Milwaukee:
It was a dazzling parade of flowers more than 10 feet long and 3 or 4 feet wide. Clearly ‘TigerEye’ does not have any issues with air circulation.
I have no idea why ‘TigerEye’ did so poorly in my flowerbeds, but after seeing such a robust display at Boerner, how could I not give it one more chance?