Foxglove Fantasy

This morning is the calm before the storm. It's cool, damp, overcast and perfect garden weather. The storm on the horizon is not a rain or wind storm, tomorrows forecast is for temperatures to soar to the mid 90's (35 celsius) and stay there for several days. Many of my poor spring perennials will surely suffer.

Right now our biennial Digitalis purpurea (Foxgloves) are bursting into bloom all over the garden. Luckily, I remember to let these beauties scatter seeds everywhere so I always have a large population of them. To be honest, I actually weed out many of them just before they begin blooming as I have too many of them!

In this opening photo I wonder if you can see the mutant scape coming up on this one plant. It's super fat and yet super thin. As it starts to bloom I will need to take more photos.

Here's a stepped back view of this area, you can see all the bloom scapes just beginning to open up their glorious flowers.

Further along in this part of the garden all the blooms are of a similar color. I try to remember to cut back the darkest purple blooms and only let the white and pale lavender blooms go to seed. The dark color though must be dominant as the majority of blooms are always dark purple.

Behind the biennial variety of Digitalis is the perennial sibling Digitalis lutea. It has pale yellow blooms and with the heatwave that is coming, I expect them to open up any day now.

I wish the perennial variety was a bit more prolific, I'm only up to three plantings of them so far.

In the herb bed are these huge white specimen. I could stand there for hours staring at them.

As a closing sneak peek, here's a Tradescantia (spiderwort) that just began blooming. I have no idea if this is a named variety or a seedling that popped up but the flowers are larger than any other in my garden and their color is wonderful.

So many gardeners have told me that they cannot get their foxgloves to reseed or reappear in their gardens. I guess my advice is to not cultivate the area near them or cover it with too much mulch. By the way, past experience tells me that they grow like crazy in a garden heavily amended with composted manure.

Do foxgloves grow for you?