Keyed Out #055 — Rudbeckia hirta

Question 1

What looks like one flower is a whole colony: a dozen or so strap-shaped {florets} ringing several hundred minute tubular ones, all seated together on a single shared {receptacle} and wrapped in a collar of overlapping green {bracts}, not a spray of separate small flowers each riding its own spoke out from a common point.

Accepted Answer

daisy family

Question 2

Each fertile floret ripens into a single dry, one-seeded, four-angled case that never splits open, and that case develops from an ovary seated below the floret rather than above it, so the spent head is a nub of hundreds of separate little cases.

Accepted Answer

Asteraceae

Question 3

Split a golden strap from the rim and its base is empty of sex, with no stamens and no ovary and nothing that could ever set seed, so every grain the head produces is made instead by the small dark tubes of the cone.

Accepted Answer

Rudbeckia

Question 4

Between the tubes of the cone sits a small chaffy scale to each floret, and those scales stay soft-tipped, blunt and no longer than the {florets} they cradle, so a dry head crushes to powder in the fist instead of jabbing it.

Accepted Answer

Rudbeckia

Question 5

Stem, both leaf faces and even the narrow green straps beneath the head all bristle with long, stiff, outward-standing hairs that rasp against a thumb, rather than carrying a thin down pressed flat to the surface or a smooth, waxy-bloomed skin.

Accepted Answer

Rudbeckia hirta

Question 6

Every blade on the plant is one undivided piece, elliptic to lance-shaped or ovate and tapered to its base, its edge entire or merely saw-toothed, with no blade anywhere cut into three or more separate lobes.

Accepted Answer

Rudbeckia hirta