Category — Shade gardens

Most of the foxgloves on these wish lists are ones I want to plant. But some of the foxgloves I’m describing in these two wish lists are ones I wish to avoid. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good plants,  perfect for your garden: it just means I’m as subject to the Dr. Fell Phenomenon as anyone. (”I do not like thee, Dr. Fell/The reason why I cannot tell/I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.”)

I’m going to take the Digitalis purpurea selections first (I mean, the ones I haven’t covered in my previous posts), and then continue with an alphabetical list of the other ones I rounded up. I’m including names of sources for plants or seeds, since most of these varieties are too obscure to be found everywhere.

If you have your own favorite varieties, I hope you’ll let us know what they are and why you like them.

Digitalis purpurea variations:

If I had infinite garden room, which unfortunately I do not, I might try Digitalis pupurea ‘Monstruosa’. Pine Tree seeds says, “The color and shape of this plant are seldom seen in gardens today. It is reminiscent of the heirloom varieties.” It’s hard for me to tell from the photo how they might vary from plain Digitalis purpurea; the five-foot height isn’t particularly monstrous for foxgloves in my experience - but subtle differences could make ‘Monstruosa’ worthwhile.

Another candidate for the “new and improved wild foxglove” theme is ‘Candy Mountain’, offered by Territorial Seed Company. The difference in this one is that the flowers face outward instead of drooping down. I’d like to see the change this makes in foxglove presence in my garden. Alas, it may be awhile before that happens: garden space is tight.

The ‘Excelsior’ selection of Digitalis purpurea seems to be an older variation of ‘Candy Mountain’; the flowers face outward, instead of down, and go all around the stem. Colors are the usual D. purpurea range, from cream to red-purple, and the spikes are said to be long. Since it’s been around for awhile, you can find this selection in several seed catalogues; JL Hudson or Pine Tree for two.

‘Rose Shades’(offered by Burpee) boasts a great example of catalogue puff-writing, but it still looks like plain old Digitalis purpurea to me.

‘Dwarf Red’ is a German development of Digitalis purpurea, offered by Pine Tree Seeds. For a foxglove, it is small: 30″ (76 cm) to 40″ (102 cm) tall. The family-owned seed company which bred it worked on getting blossoms all they way around the stem; the flowers are rosy pink, with maroon and yellow spots. Because it’s relatively small, you can use this foxglove in the front of borders and other small spots where a larger D. purpurea wouldn’t work.

Digitalis Gloxinaeflora - A cultivar of D. purpurea, it has open-mouthed flowers instead of bells (presumably like a gloxinia, as the name suggests). While I like gloxinias, for me a lot of the charm in foxgloves is in their secretive bell-like flowers. So, for either the same reason that I won’t be planting D. laevigata again, or for the opposite reason, D. Gloxinaeflora will not be appearing in my garden soon, no matter how rich the colors or large and dense the spikes. But if it sounds intriguing to you, you can get seed from JL Hudson.

Next post: the list continues: Strange and Unusual Foxgloves

Who could forget a plant with a flower stalk as long as your leg?

I tried and tried to photograph the way this stem of flowers twisted and turned like a huge arm of artistically-shaded pastel flowers bent at the elbow, never breaking (well, I did tie it up at the top, so it wouldn’t topple of its own weight),  and opening blooms from shoulder to tip for weeks.

This was in the beginning of my photographic career, so I had even fewer ideas than I do now of how to capture the personality of The Shirley, curled and crowded with flowers. In my garden notebook, I noted that I’d read somewhere that this variety has more flowers gong all the way around the stem than other purpureas. Mine certainly lived up to that claim, even when the flowers at the lower end were past their prime.

‘Shirley’, by the way, refers not to a woman, but to Shirley, England, home of Rev. William Wilkes, who did such a fine job selecting Shirley poppies.  I love both his poppies and foxgloves, bred the old fashioned way, by years of selection. Considering all the fine varieites of foxgloves and poppies available, it’s saying something that, a hundred years after he developed them, Rev. Wilkes’s plants are still going strong.

His foxgloves aren’t as well-known as his poppies, though, and they should be.

JL Hudson describes Shirley foxgloves as “one of the finest, a giant variety to 5 feet, sometimes towering to 9 feet (3 meters), with long, dense spikes to 2 feet (61 cm) long.”

This is gross understatement, in the case of The Shirley I grew.  Since it was curved, I had a hard time measuring the flower spike, but you can see for yourself that it’s a lot longer than two feet. It was probably longer than my leg. It was certainly as big around as the calf of my leg. People who actually stake their foxgloves will have an impressive plant towering gently over their gardens - if they have stakes tall enough.

More than any other foxglove, The Shirley delights with the tasteful color change of its flowers from bud to pollinated bloom, creating an ombre-dyed effect as the color flushes up the stem. And it is the densest-flowering digitalis I have ever grown. Words and pictures cannot do justice to The Shirley. You must grow it in your garden.

Next post: Yes, even more D. purpurea cultivars.  A list of four, with pithy commentary. I hope.

My first experience with ‘Foxy’ made me feel that ‘annual’ might be an exaggeration. The two plants that sprouted from seed made the same little rosette that biennial foxgloves make, and as the weather warmed, I didn’t see any signs of a flower spike (like the one forming in the picture of foxglove foliage above).

However, as the weather warmed, the earwigs swarmed, and ate the two plants that I had grown and transplanted. Perhaps I didn’t give ‘Foxy’ a fair shake. It’s possible, too, that in order for it to be an annual, it needs a late-summer planting, not the late-fall planting I give to most of my foxglove seeds. (I plant them somewhere around the time the rains start, like my other cool-weather plants. This prevents untimely deaths.) In any case, I’m trying ‘Foxy’ again this year.

Burpee’s  informs me that ‘Foxy’ is an All-American Winner, which means it’s a plant of substance. It is supposed to flower five months after planting. Burpee’s touts up to nine flower spikes per plant, in colors of the usual purpurea spectrum: purple-red, white, and some colors in between.

JL Hudson says it was the first annual foxglove ever developed, a silver medal All-American winner in 1966. Five months is the time from seed to bloom according to them, too, and the colors are “large spotted, red, rose, white or yellow flowers in dense spikes.” By June, it claims, they can bloom at a mere 18″ tall (about half a meter), and grow on to 3 feet (just under 1 meter).

Some write that Foxy’s flower spikes are not up to industry standard. Even if that’s so, a mediocre foxglove is bound to be better than a superb - well, lots of things. Foxy is also a bit smaller than ordinary foxglove, running two to three feet.

My old Time-Life encyclopedia of gardening says that Foxy is derived from D. purpurea (which is what it looks like in the pictures), and blooms in the first year as well as the second.  They recommend fall planting, so I guess I had that right. Or you can plant them six or eight weeks before frost to get late-summer/early-fall blooms. (I doubt this would work in my area, where late summer and early fall can be blazing hot.)

Once again, I’ve been given new hope and cheer by books and catalogues Or maybe I’ve been given a new delusion. Whatever. Spring will tell.

Next post: Mightiest of all purpurea cultivars: The Shirley

References:

Burpee’s catalogue, 2009

J.L. Hudson catalogue, 2008

James Underwood Crockett, Annuals, Time-Life Encyclopedia of Gardening series, 1973, 1974

Strawberry foxglove is tall. Strawberry foxglove has flowers of a unique, crushed-strawberry color. Many magical qualities are attributed to this foxglove.

Most of which pass me by.

JL Hudson lists it as Digitalis x mertonensis, and says it is a stable hybrid cross, from D. grandiflora and D. purpurea.

My memory was that D. grandiflora is a yellow type, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it listed, and I never managed to grow it, so I wasn’t sure until I looked it up.  My old Sunset Western Garden book says D. grandiflora (formerly ambigua) flowers are large, 2 to 3 inches (about 5 to 7.5 cm) long, yellowish with brown markings. Antique Flowers says that Digitalis grandiflora hails from Greece, and has creamy yellow flowers; the picture proves this. Either everyone’s eye is a little different, or this variety sports the same way the purpurea ones do. Or perhaps it’s a difference in soils and climates.

Digitalis x mertonensis seems to have taken on the long-lived qualites of D. grandiflora, also its rather shorter dimensions: strawberry foxglove is a two- to three-foot perennial. At least this is what the experts say. All I can say is that mine was maybe two feet tall, and disappeared after one round of bloom. I didn’t have any problem growing D. mertonensis, though; it likes the same circumstances for growing that D. purpurea foxgloves do: moist soil and semishade.

I’m sorry to say that my pictures of D. mertonensis have fallen down the same digital abyss that sucked away my ‘Pam’s Choice’ photos, because color is the main subject of discussion in every Digitalis x mertonensis description. I read much about those crushed-strawberry flowers, so exotic and so desirable, they seemed to inspire purple prose: I can’t remember all the places where I read about it now, but believe me, they raved about this foxglove. Kitchen Gardens calls it “Strawberry Fayre”.

But my strawberry foxglove was only - well - fair. Only OK. It could have been the very-shady growing conditions that made the stem fairly short, and the  flowers so floppy and extra-downward-looking. It could have been my mood that made me feel their color was more like something that had gone past its prime than something delectable. Maybe even the deep green glossy leaves contributed: I really enjoy the hairy crinkled rugoseness of foxglove leaves. Maybe it was just a personal thing.

Perhaps I deserved my disappointment, because I was guilty of plant snobbery: I grew D. mertonensis because I wanted to grow as many digitalis as I could that weren’t D. purpurea, so common.

Whatever it was, Digitalis x mertonensis is not on my list of foxgloves to replant. But maybe you’ll want it on yours.

Next post: Annual foxgloves.  Maybe.

When I read the description: “palest pink, with a hint of warm champagne color” is how I remember it - I had to have it.

Yet, as with so many kinds of desire, I found that when I’d realized my dream, it came with a whimper, and not a bang. The difference between D. purpurea ‘Champagne’ and D. purpurea is detectable by the naked eye, but only just.

While I loved the grouping of the pink(ish) foxglove with rose ‘Sharifa Asma’, and the beautiful vining Dioscorea batatas (pictured at the top of the page), I just wasn’t convinced that this particular foxglove looked all that different from the wild type.

In this picture, you can see cream-yellow shading in the opening flowers that/which might lead someone to the name ‘Champagne’.

And in this one, a more normal wild version of foxglove is on the left, while the paler ‘Champagne’ is on the right. Trouble is - they came from the same packet of seed. I didn’t plant any plain wild purpureas there, and made a point of planting seedlings into separate containers by type. Since D. purpurea seems to sport a lot, it’s entirely possible that one of the seedlings just reverted back to wild type. It’s also possible that other seedlings might have been more markedly different from the wild-type, more like the description of my dreams.

But I have too small a garden to get really scientific about this, and so I just struck ‘Champagne’ from my roster. I haven’t planted it since.

This year, I planted a Digitalis purpurea ssp. ‘Heywoodii’  (Silver Fox and Pink Champagne are two of its cultivar names - could this be the very same seed under another name?). I got the seeds from J.L. Hudson. They are silver-down-leaved hardy biennials from southern Portugal,  where it grows on granite outcroppings. I’m guessing these outcroppings might be in the mountains, because this digitalis is short: about 30″ tall. (So maybe it is a different kind of seed; my ‘Champagne’ grew at least 5 feet tall.) Some sources say  D. p. ‘Heywoodii’ has a tendency to go perennial, which always attracts me.  The flowers are crowded in loose spikes and the color, says the seed packet, is “creamy white blushed pink”. Hope springs eternal.

Next post: Strawberry foxglove. Not as big a deal as I’d hoped.