If you have a spot in your garden with dappled shade, where the soil doesn't get too dry, Foxgloves can be a good idea. Under the trees along our drive seemed like a good spot so I bought a packet of seeds of special hybrid ones few years ago, and the 6 or 8 plants I got from it managed to survive.
Foxgloves are biennial, so you plant them one year to flower the next, and they die after flowering. So when I am cutting off the old flower spikes, I do a little medicine dance with them, shaking the seed pods over the ground so that there's plenty of seed for next year's crop. As long as I don't weed the bed too closely, and just let them grow, there's normally some flowers the following year.
Sometimes I get a few plants, sometimes a lot. This year has been unusual, with the entire bed covered in Foxgloves. There's self-seeded Aquilegia and Sage too, all adding to the natural look and blending in with the blue-to-pink shades. The Rose bushes and Lilly plants are completely hidden by all this, but in a couple of years they will be too big to hide. And meanwhile, I think the effect is quite special.
3 comments:
I do like that effect, very soft and fluid.
We had a bank of apricot foxgloves when we lived in Harrow and though they changed colour over the years there were always enough to keep the bank going by scattering the seeds of the selected and whipping the other colours into a stout bag.
I do like that effect, very soft and fluid.
We had a bank of apricot foxgloves when we lived in Harrow and though they changed colour over the years there were always enough to keep the bank going by scattering the seeds of the selected and whipping the other colours into a stout bag.
My favourite flowers I think - we have some huge ones in our garden this year - good plan to spread the seeds
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