Jul 17, 2021
Plant of the Day
Saturday 17 July 2021
The biennial or short-lived perennial Digitalis purpurea (foxglove) is flowering in a range of gardens I’ve visited recently, and even featuring on a gate at Waterperry Gardens, Oxford. Foxgloves will freely self-sow producing a rosette of soft leaves from which emerges a tall, one-sided spires of pendant, tubular, rosy-purple flowers. In an Orkney garden I saw an example of a plant with a peloric flower, which is a radially symmetrical flower that occurs in species with bilateral flowers. This terminal flower mutation, sometimes called Digitalis purpurea monstrosa, has been described by botanists from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.
Jill Raggett
