A genus of composite plants, the coneflowers, consisting of perennial herbs with showy pedunculate heads, having a hemispherical involucre, sterile ray flowers, and a conical chaffy receptacle. There are about thirty species, exclusively North American. Rudbeckia hirta, the black-eyed Susan, is a common weed in meadows.

North American perennial herbs with showy cone-shaped flower heads

Rudbeckia is one of at least four genera within the flowering plant family Asteraceae whose members are commonly known as coneflowers; the others are Echinacea, Dracopis and Ratibida.