Tag Archives: Digitalis purpurea

Seeing through another’s eyes and TMF here

I am fine with the foxgloves in the Iolanthe Garden but there are no common pink ones

We no longer open for the springtime garden festival here but it is still a time of year when out-of-town friends come to see the garden. One such friend is an Auckland garden designer. I never ask for advice because I think seeking free advice is not much different to asking a medical professional for personal advice at a social event. Some lines should not be crossed. On the flip side, both Mark and I have a policy of not offering unsolicited advice in somebody else’s garden, no matter how tempting at the time, so this may all be a bit self-defeating. Our designer friend has a similar approach but he asked one simple question. We were looking at the Court Garden and he said three words, “Why the foxgloves’?

The large flowered yellow Verbascum creticum is fine but the foxgloves were just wrong in that situation

I suddenly looked through his eyes and indeed it was a good question to ask. I went to some trouble when I planted the garden back in 2019 to add palest, pastel coloured foxgloves to add some height and flowers in spring and I have let them gently seed down. Well, at the time they were meant to be pure white ones but they turned out pastel. I had not questioned their presence since but when I looked with different eyes, it occurred to me that they are, in fact, insipid in that situation. I looked at them for the next two days and on the third day, I pulled the lot out. When I sent a text to my friend to say they were gone, he just replied with the single word “Good”.

Flowering or not, once the decision was made, they had to go

Besides, we were running the danger of TMF – Too Many Foxgloves. For years, I have been so focused on pulling out every common pink one and even paler pink versions of it (because foxglove seed will naturally revert to the unattractive pink form) that I hadn’t looked at the overall picture. While I am particularly fond of the pure white form, especially in the Iolanthe garden which is more perennial meadow than anything else and down in the park, we don’t want them everywhere. It is time to review all locations where we have allowed them to grow and time to limit their range.

It is not even an attractive pink and it doesn’t combine well with other colours. I regard it as a weed.

I went to see a garden during the recent festival which I hadn’t seen for many years and now has new owners. It was a very nice garden and well maintained but as I walked around, I thought to myself that if they asked me for advice, it would be to pull out 90% of their dark pink foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) , if not the lot of them, leaving just the white ones. They have let them seed everywhere and, to my eyes, it was a definite case of TMF. They didn’t ask, so I didn’t comment. But it made me more aware of letting them grow here in our garden.

No matter how good a plant is, it is still a mistake to have too much of it. I refer not just to foxgloves but also forget-me-nots, mondo grass, common verbascums, Verbena bonariensis, pansies, aquilegias and a host of other plants that self seed around the garden. In our garden, I would also add tree ferns, nikau palms (Rhopalostylis sapida) and kawakawa (Macropiper excelsum) to that list.

It wasn’t the gladious that was the problem; it was the foxgloves

Interestingly, as soon as I removed the pastel foxgloves from the Court Garden, having decided they were the wrong plant and too pallid, the anything-but-insipid Gladiolus dalenii syn natalensis no longer looked out of place at all; it changed from looking somewhat garish to vibrant instead. It can stay after all. It has only just dawned on me that the reason the foxgloves looked insipid in that location is the background. In the Court Garden, they were surrounded by plants that were either pale green hues or silver or many shades of brown. They look more charming in situations surrounded by masses of darker or brighter shades of green. I should have noticed this earlier.

A garden is never finished and even with an established garden, fine tuning it is what keeps it interesting. Sometimes, seeing it through somebody else’s eyes can be very helpful and small changes can make a big difference. I might ask for more advice from people whose opinions I value. Maybe it is not the same as asking my dentist about toothache over social cocktails after all.

The Court Garden with Verbascum creticum but no foxgloves any longer

Nothing at all to do with either foxes or gloves but here we are

Gardening a cyclic affair. I see I write about foxgloves every few years at this time of the season and here we are. It is this time of the year, I get around the garden to pull out the nasty pink ones.

There are about 20 different species of foxglove and we have tried a few of the different ones, particularly in honey and soft yellow shades but really, it is only the common Digitalis purpurea which lasts the distance. The other species are much pickier and won’t naturalise for us.

It is the shade of pink, I think, that bothers me so much I won’t even tolerate them in wilder areas of the garden

What is it I dislike so much about the pink form? It really is the colour and the status of the plant as a countryside weed, though I think I would be less worried about the weed aspect if it was a prettier colour. I do, after all, grow wild fennel in the summer gardens. That murky, hard pink is just not a colour I like. I like it even less in a garden situation because I feel it lacks any refinement or charm.

Whites and pastels gently seeding in the gravel heap. They were a little more impressive earlier in the season before the rains came in the last week.

The whites and pastels are no less thug-like in their growth habits but I like the height and the flower form and I am fine with letting them seed around in a gentle sort of way. We have a patch of self-sown seedlings growing in a small gravel heap – the contents of the capillary beds back in the days when we had a nursery on site. It is quite handy having a stash of fine gravel to use in some situations and it is not doing any harm where we stockpiled it. The foxgloves are happy to grow in straight gravel.

Red ribs to the left are meant to mean pink flowers but no, this is not always the case. Green ribs to the right, however, usually indicate white flowers
I can categorically state that this plant has white flowers with a few red freckles inside, despite those clear red ribs on the foliage

It is because I keep track of that patch, that I have worked out that the advice to cull any seedlings that have red ribs to the leaves if you want to get rid of the pink ones and keep the whites and pales is not in fact accurate. It may be true that all dark pink ones have red ribbing on the foliage but it is not true the other way round – so, too, can some of the whites and pales. For a brief while, I thought that only the white foxgloves with freckles or spots inside the thimble flowers had red ribs but no, so too do some of the all whites with no freckles.

All white forms in the Iolanthe garden where their thuggish and wild ways are fine

The white foxgloves are simply a variant of the same species, Digitalis purpurea, but the dominant gene is clearly pink so if you are not vigilant on weeding out the stronger pink forms, you will end up with a dwindling number of white seedlings. You have to pull the plants out and remove them from the site as soon as the colour is obvious. If you leave them to flower, the bees which constantly work these blooms will transfer the pollen from one to another so the genes in the seed will not stay the more desirable white.

The common pink to the right is not acceptable to me; the second from the left opens white but matures to the same pink tones I dislike so must also be removed in its prime

I also pull out plants which are clearly pastel forms of the same pink parent rather than the peachy hues of some I have and I pull those plants that think they can outwit me by opening white and then changing colour to pink as the flowers mature. Were I truly dedicated to the genus, I might start selecting for different habits – more compact or with larger sized thimbles for example – but I don’t love them enough for that. I am fine with keeping to pure whites in the Iolanthe garden and pastel peach in the Court Garden.

If I lived in a drier climate, I might expend the same random energy on lupins – another plant that hovers on the margins between being a delightful garden plant, wildflower or even noxious weed. But lupins don’t like our high rainfall, high humidity conditions so I must make do with foxgloves.

Foxgloves – the fine line between weed, wildflower and garden plant

I like foxgloves, in a wild flower sort of way. But the common pinky-purple form around here, not so much. In fact I have been pulling them out this week. I haven’t gone to the effort of trying to get white and pale ones established to see them all gradually returning to that hard shade of deep pink. I had a pretty honey peach coloured one that flowered in isolation in a gravel heap last year and left it to seed, thinking that as it was standing alone, the seedlings would be the same colour. There were over a hundred seedlings and at least half have gone back to the deep pink colour I spurn. I have been pulling them out as soon as they reveal their true colours to try and preempt the bees cross pollinating.

No the left, yes to the right

This unceremonious rooting out of the spurned colour was because of a series of photos I saw recently showing a local garden’s ‘English-style herbaceous planting’. Leaving aside the somewhat dodgy descriptor, what struck me was the jarring appearance of the common deep pink foxglove in a more refined garden setting. To my eye, it would have worked were these white or pastel, but in that hard colour – no thanks. It takes a deft touch to bring a local weed into a garden and make it appear harmonious.

The range of shades with the common wild form to the right

On my rounds of dealing to the plants whose sole crime is that they are an undesirable colour, I see that most of the seedlings from the pure whites we had are now more pastel. Naturally I wanted to pick an array of them to arrange in gradations of hue. There is quite a bit of variation in the size of the flowers too. Some have freckles and some don’t. I like the peachy tones more than the pale pinks.

Some tried to outwit me by opening creamy lemon and ageing to purple, all on the same stem, but I can see them!

I resisted the temptation to go back to childhood habits and use them as gloves for my finger tips. In those days, we didn’t worry about their toxic properties. These days they come with a warning so I try and wash my hands after handling them without gloves. But on the scale of poisonous plants, they aren’t up there with the most toxic ones.

There are about 20 different species of foxgloves but only Digitalis purpurea has naturalised in the countryside here. I bought some seed of a yellow variant from a local supplier but Mark tells me that only one germinated. It will take years of culling to get the more desirable shades established as the dominant plant here.

The best ornamental planting I have seen remains the white foxgloves at Hidcote that first inspired me to look more closely at this plant. I wonder if they start afresh each season or let them seed down? But maybe they don’t have any other colours around to contaminate the purity of the white strain.

Mark was raised on the flower fairy books by Cicely Mary Barker. I can’t think how my English mother ever missed out on introducing them to me, especially as the author bears the same uncommon spelling of her first name as my mother did. But we raised our own children with them.  Though if I am honest, the charm lies more in the illustrations and the small book format than in the poetry which  never scanned sufficiently well to read aloud comfortably.

“Foxglove, Foxglove,
What do you see?”
The cool green woodland,
The fat velvet bee;
Hey, Mr Bumble,
I’ve honey here for thee!

“Foxglove, Foxglove,
What see you now?”
The soft summer moonlight
On bracken, grass, and bough;
And all the fairies dancing
As only they know how.

Cicely Mary Barker, 1927.

Schooling the foxgloves

White foxgloves, though at Tikorangi, not Hidcote

White foxgloves, though at Tikorangi, not Hidcote

An enduring memory of our visit to Hidcote Manor Garden in Gloucestershire was a simple planting of white foxgloves. They stood like grand white sentinels, belying their humble botanical status. A packet of white foxglove seed was top of the list on our next seed order.

Common foxgloves – and the white is just a form of the common Digitalis purpurea – are not difficult to grow. Not at all. We let some pink ones seed down through the park and in outlying garden areas. I think our widespread, dismissive attitude to foxgloves has to do with an earlier rural orientation in this country where such plants are seen as noxious weeds. But we are not farmers, so some seeding wildflowers naturalised on our property are not a problem, adding to biodiversity and providing a food source for insects.

Common Digitalis purpurea seen here with Rhododendron Caroline Allbrook

Common Digitalis purpurea seen here with Rhododendron Caroline Allbrook

???????????????????????????????The whites I wanted for my rose and perennial garden. After a few years, I am now moving them. They are too big and choke and swamp the smaller perennials I have in that area. I have found a couple of spots which they can have all to themselves. I was amused to see English gardener, Keith Wiley – for whom we have huge respect – on TV talking about growing plants in colonies but noting that some plants are so dominant that they do not want to grow in colonies. He cited foxgloves as an example. They are way too thuggish to co-exist happily with many other plants.

I could have saved myself a lot of trial and error if I had looked to the ground where the Hidcote foxgloves grew and taken note of what else did or did not grow there and how much space each huge rosette of leaves occupied. Instead, I was so enchanted by the summer display at eye level that I failed to observe further.

???????????????????????????????Carol Klein on BBC’s Gardeners’ World, once said that she sorted her foxgloves as juvenile plants – the pink ones had pink veining in the leaves and the crown whereas the white ones were all green. I am not convinced she is right though I went through a stage of culling all pink-veined seedlings. I am happy to stand corrected if somebody has been more systematic in assessing this, but I am pretty sure that I have pink-veined ones flowering white and vice versa.

What I can tell you from experience is that foxgloves have very large tops but small root systems so are easy to transplant even when quite large, as long as I reduce the foliage by anything up to 75%. They are tough. I am hoping by next year to have my white Hidcote sentinels flowering in abundance in positions where they can be glorious without smothering other plants.

Seedling variation showing a white centre to the common purple

Seedling variation showing a white centre to the common purple