Carol Klein
These cottage garden classics are tough plants that will add colour to difficult spots
THIS WEEK AT GLEBE COTTAGE
The latest from Carol's beautiful cottage garden... plus her diary for the week!
Foxgloves are instantly recognisable. The long purple-pink bells of our native foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, with their characteristic spotted throats, are an iconic image, and we all see it with a big fat bumblebee collecting nectar and pollen.
On tracts of Forestry Commission land close to us, whenever plantations of conifers are felled for timber, the ground looks barren for a year, but in the next season, the hillside is awash with a pink sea. As light and rain can at last penetrate the earth, the seed bank that has lain dormant erupts into growth. There is something magical about the way these tall spires appear from nowhere.
This is a wild flower that no one can ignore; sometimes growing much taller than me. Those of us who are vertically challenged can look up into the foxglove bells and view the secrets inside with ease.
Digitalis purpurea is a biennial, and sets copious amounts of seed. In a garden situation, it needs to be planted in two consecutive years so new plants and flowers will be produced every year. The whiteflowered variety D. purpurea ‘Alba’ looks particularly good in the shady corners. Give it a soil rich in humus, and it will grow happily, eventually making good colonies.
One of the most awkward situations in any garden is its edges; whether its boundaries are hedges, walls or fences. The plants that grow with them as a backdrop need to be extra accommodating and able to contend with uneven light and erratic amounts of water. Foxgloves are more than up to the job, simply because they thrive in the wild in exactly the same conditions: they are archetypal hedgerow plants. Hedges aren’t a natural phenomenon, but along with such plants as Euphorbia amygdaloides, and our wild primrose, foxgloves have successfully made the transition from their natural habitat – the woodland edge – to the hedgerow.
Any foxglove will come true to its species from seed, although seed from ‘Alba’ is not guaranteed to yield white-flowered plants. From the time seedlings have true leaves and are a couple of inches tall, you can tell whether or not they will be purple (pink) or white. White-flowering seedlings have no trace of purple on their stems or leaves, and their leaves are much softer and more velvety than those of the straight Digitalis purpurea.
