Category — Foliage

These sunflowers were already towering over my head in late June. (Okay, they’re in a raised bed–but they would have been over my head even growing in the ground.) They’re volunteers in a friend’s garden, so they got an early start.

Flowers are usually the stars of the garden show–and they get a lot of star treatment on this blog.

But flowers are a fleeting thing. It’s the leaves that make flowers possible. And it’s the leaves that last through the season.

So for a couple of posts, I’m going to focus on a few kinds of foliage I particularly like, in garden and wild plants.

Digitalis purpurea (common foxglove) has beautiful foliage which is rarely noticed, because the flowers are so spectacular. In fact, by the time the flowers come along, the foliage has gotten kind of scant and chewed-looking. (Maybe this doesn’t happen in more well-regulated gardens, but it does in mine.) These emerging rosettes always look as if they’re thrusting their way out.

I always think I’ve lost my daturas, because the leaves don’t emerge until May. When they do, it’s cause for celebration, because I’m inordinately fond of daturas.

Of course I relish the beautiful flowers later in the season, but even the old, chewed-on leaves are a treat to the eye (I have this one as my computer desktop right now).

Next post: foliage from wild plants.