Foxgloves

When I was introduced to Foxgloves as a child, I was intrigued.  Why did foxes need gloves?  Did they sneak up in the night to pull the flowers off and slide them onto paws for silent slinking?  I tried slipping my fingers into the flowers on the plants, but they didn't seem very practical: no grip.  And my parents warned me about the possibility of bees being inside so I might get stung.

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.