General Culture:

Easily grown in average, medium moisture soils in part shade to full shade. Prefers humusy, organically rich, moisture-retentive soils. Foliage tends to scorch and otherwise depreciate if soils are allowed to dry out. Best sited in locations sheltered from strong winds. This is a slow-to-establish plant.

Noteworthy Characteristics:

‘Hillside Black Beauty’ is a bugbane cultivar that is noted for its ferny, coppery-purple foliage. Foliage clump typically grows to 2.5’ tall, but fall flowering spikes bring overall plant height to 4-6’ tall. Small, numerous, creamy white (sometimes with a pink tinge), strongly fragrant flowers appear in late summer to early fall in long, bottlebrush-like terminal racemes resembling fluffy spires (typically 1-1.5’ long). Flowering racemes appear on upright, wiry stems. Astilbe-like, deeply cut, ternately compound foliage is an attractive copper-purple. Synonymous with and formerly known as Cimicifuga ramosa ‘Hillside Black Beauty’. All plants in the genus Cimicifuga have recently been transferred to the genus Actaea. The common name of bugbane is in reference to the odoriferous insect repellant properties of this plant. A. simplex plants are also sometimes commonly called cohosh which comes from an Algonquin word meaning rough in reference to the appearance of the plant rhizome. Plants in the Atropurpurea Group typically have purple to bronze tinted foliage.