It began with a stroke of luck, early one August, at the edge of the Botanical Garden in Graz.
Wandering in its shadow, an Austrian named Heinrich Hagemann is the reason we all now know Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’, a modest member of the black-eyed Susan family. Hagemann’s chance find might have stayed a quiet footnote had it not landed with Dr Karl Foerster, Germany’s legendary perennial breeder. Foerster looked at this unassuming “wallflower” and saw something else entirely: the perennial to end all perennials. Robust. Resilient. Beautiful. Free-flowering to the point of generosity. He pulled it out of obscurity and placed it centre stage in the autumn garden. It has been blooming there ever since.
What you are looking at in these photographs is exactly what Foerster fell for: a golden mantle, studded with velvet-black centres, thrown like a blanket over the fading, spent blooms of summer. Just as the rest of the garden begins to surrender to the season, ‘Goldsturm’ ignites the garden’s final act.
What It Asks For
Very little, in return for all of that.
- Sun — a place in it, and it will do the rest.
- A little compost — with a feed of organic matter and horn shavings in spring.
- Odd numbers — plant in loose groups, better still in generous waves.
- A hard cut in June — back by as much as half; it returns sturdier and even more generous with flower.
It repays you with weeks of unbroken colour and a constitution that shrugs off mildew, drought and neglect alike.
The Gold Standard
Nearly a century after that August morning in Graz, ‘Goldsturm’ remains the perennial garden’s gold standard. It is, in short, exactly what Foerster promised: willing, and utterly without airs.
And it is prolific — as you can see at Forstamt, where small offspring are wandering out onto the round and into the lawn.
Sources: Karl Foerster · Tracy DiSabato-Aust, The Well-Tended Perennial Garden · Sarastro Stauden