DIGITALIS IN WONDERLAND

   The history of Foxglove and its' use as medicine is an interesting tale well worth the telling; but it is a complicated one. It was how to tell the story and how much I would need to explain that had me stalled for a moment. But there is no help for it: I must tell it all or at least as much as I have learned and understood. In particular, I needed to discover the truth of the many reports of fatal encounters between children and Foxgloves in the garden.
   As the King said, in Alice in Wonderland, "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
  I hope that I will know when I have said enough and you have to begin somewhere; so why not with the fact that Digitalis purpurea is a 'biennial' ? There is as much fuzzy thinking around biennials as there is about Foxgloves.
An annual grows from a seed, then flowers and makes more seed; all in one growing season. A biennial produces only foliage in its' first year and flowers and seeds on the next. Then the plant dies.
   Garden centre operators are happy to leave 'biennial' hazely undefined and let gardeners assume that the plants are perennials with the strange habit of only flowering on alternate years. If you are going to have Foxgloves as permanent tenants you will depend on their successful self-seeding. As an aid to making this quite clear, let me introduce the word 'monocarpic'. This means producing seeds once only; then the plant dies, its' mission accomplished. A famous example is Giant Sea Holly, Eryngiun giganteum. (For more on this story Google 'Miss Willmott's Ghost'.)
Century Plant, Agave americana may not need one hundred years but certainly a few decades before its glorious climax. Many bamboo take more than a century before whole forests make a simultaneous exit.
   Foxgloves have given us a very helpful medicine to treat cases of congestive heart failure. I suggest that you should file that interesting information in some seldom used part of your brain; somewhere that you will not stumble upon too often.
   Garden Centres still sell many species and cultivars of Foxgloves as very desirable flowering plants. Poisoning their customers is hardly a good business plan. Sensible gardeners ignore the doomsayers and the hysterically anxious. To call Foxgloves poisonous plants is another example of the gross misuse of the word. It is not something that should concern you or me. However, I did say that it was a complicated story. Some people are highly allergic to even the touch of Digitalis but that is a separate issue from its' use as a heart medication. It does appear that there will always be someone somewhere allergic to something. I will explore the subject in future postings.