#pelorism

[teatotally]

I have to share my mutant foxglove plants. It looks like the top blossoms fused together into this triffid-ass mutoid flower head. The first two are of one plant, the third is a different one that’s slightly less perfectly circular. I don’t know what is happening in my alien 👽 garden but there’s a bunch of these now and I’m hoping they’re not watching and waiting to kill me. (It’s apparently called pelorism.)

[jillraggett]

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