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Dirt on the Keys

A plant geek sweats over, swears at, and celebrates in his own gardens
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The usual pink-flowered foxgloves cause my fingers to drum on the desk.
Yes, the spikes of flowers have the English it-will-never-get-truly-hot early Summer lushness. (But yes, they often need a bit of staking.) And yes, I like how they very considerately die after flowering, getting out of the way for the hot-weather show of the heat-lovers that make the July, August, and September garden such a thrill. Just let one or two die in peace, to ripen seed, and you'll have pink foxgloves forever.
But, they are pink. And that limits them to the few places (I hope) where you don't also have a lot of fun yellow and chartreuse foliage. Why not a foxglove that loves to pal around with yellow? Then you could have foxgloves anywhere, no matter what other colors were happening. Here's the answer: Digitalis 'Flashing Spires'. Narrow all-green leaves and narrow spikes of pale-yellow flowers are both self-supporting. (Take that, pink foxgloves.) And the color goes as well with pink as it does with red or yellow or orange. (Take that, pink foxgloves.)
Yes indeedy, Flashing Spires self-seeds with gusto. But the plants are very easy to yank, or (if by some miracle you don't have Flashing Spires everywhere) transplant.
Like all foxgloves, deer avoid them completely. And Flashing Spires comes absolutely true from seed, so your spires will always be the same soft-yellow. (Take that, pink foxgloves, whose offspring vary from white to pink to rose.)
I've had Flashing Spires for year (and years), and in forty years or so, look forward to passing it on to my inheritors.



My garden never met a mullein that didn't love it. Heavy soil, high water table, plenty of sun, smaller things to smother, larger things to poke up through, plenty of bees to service the flowers. Yep, it's verbascum heaven here.
Here's Verbascum thapsiforme, doing everything it does best.
The huge leaves of the fast-growing rosette arch out over everything in reach, shading them and, then, as older leaves tire and flop to the ground, smothering them directly. This plant is self-mulching! (Click the picture to see how big the plant really is.) I'll yank off the leaves from this rosette that would otherwise flatten the dwarf hostas. All verbascums I'm interested it are true biennials, with foliage the first year, a titantic skyward-thrusting bloom structure the second, jillions of seeds that germinate readily, and a quick death for the mother plant when the blooming is done. (Verbascums I'm NOT interested in? There are demure knee-high "pretty" ones that are easy to raise for flower shows. Too lady-like I'm afraid.) Verbascums pop up where they will; cracks between stones are just as appealing as open spots in beds. Excess youngsters are easy to pull; I suppose you could transplant them too when they are really young, or it's really early in Spring. But they are tap-rooted, so you'd need to move quickly.
Some verbascums—verbasca?—have rosettes that are in themselves a show, with furry as well as colorful leaves; we'll see one in a later post. But the point, literally, of verbascums is more in the architectural flower-spikes, which for me, for Verbascum thapsiforme, can get eight feet tall.
Here's one au naturelle; thank you Wikipedia. Blooming can start later in June, and doesn't finish until (can it be? I'll document this season!) Labor Day and beyond.

There is never a day hot enough, a week dry enough, for the performance to flag. And thanks to the fuzzy leaves, no one—insect, bird, deer, rabbit—ever takes so much as one bite.
This is, in short and in tall, the perfect plant for all sunny Summer gardens.