{"id":98,"date":"2008-06-16T04:07:14","date_gmt":"2008-06-16T12:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=98"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:33:02","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:33:02","slug":"standing-tall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/standing-tall\/","title":{"rendered":"Standing Tall"},"content":{"rendered":"

STANDING TALL
\n<\/font><\/font><\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Last week a tempest flew through our town, assaulting us with wind, rain and hail.\u00a0 Power lines came down along with tree limbs and occasionally, whole trees.\u00a0 The streets were strewn with debris and in some cases people didn’t get power back for days.\u00a0 When I inspected my own yard, I gave thanks that the only damage was caused by a sizeable limb that had fallen from the maple tree on the front strip and landed in the street.\u00a0 The limb completely missed the privet hedge, which means that I still have to trim the privet in addition to chopping up the fallen branch and bundling the remnants for bulk pickup.\u00a0 The high winds also toppled my rose-bedecked garden arch yet again.\u00a0 This fall, without fail, I will cement it into the ground.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The storm flattened lots of plants, but a few that I thought were goners remained standing with no obvious ill effects.\u00a0 The agaves, with flower stalks between three and four feet tall, stood as straight and proud after the uproar as they did before.\u00a0 A tall aconitum in the back also remained upright.\u00a0 The greatest post-storm success story, though, belongs to the foxgloves.\u00a0 Of the scores of plants in my garden, only a few had bent or broken stems.\u00a0 I have written about foxgloves before, but their relative imperviousness to disaster has increased my admiration exponentially.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Foxglove, which we never had in the garden when I was growing up, is a serendipitous plant, seeding itself around with wild abandon.\u00a0 Some of the common garden varieties are biennial, producing rosettes of leaves the first year and flowers the second year. \u00a0Others are perennial.\u00a0 The heart-stimulant properties of digitalis–the Latin name of both the plant and the active medicinal ingredient–have been known and used since at least the late eighteenth century.\u00a0 Digitalis has also been helping mystery authors dispatch homicide victims for nearly a century, creating puzzles for the likes of Hercule Poirot and other literary sleuths.\u00a0 If you happen to be an herb garden enthusiast you can include foxglove in your planting scheme with a clear conscience.\u00a0 It is a truly useful plant. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Most of us grow the tall, elegant Digitalis purpurea, which is native to the western Mediterranean.\u00a0 The flowers of the species are purple, as the name suggests, but breeders have produced plants bearing elongated bell-shaped or tubular flowers in an array of colors including white, cream, shades of pink, apricot, dark rose and purple.\u00a0 Sometimes, as with the popular ‘Pam’s Choice’, foxglove flowers have contrasting splotches or speckles on their throats.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Prior to the storm, my purpurea foxgloves have gotten along fine without either attention or fertilizer.\u00a0 Thriving on this neglect, several of them have risen to four feet or more in height, with tightly packed flowers that take up about two thirds of the height of each stalk.\u00a0 Of course, I have seen even taller ones at Longwood Gardens, where, I believe they fertilize them with well-aged United States currency.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My yard and garden are filled with Digitalis grandiflora Ambigua, sometimes erroneously called D. ambigua.\u00a0 I don’t know how this beautiful foxglove acquired the “ambigua”\u009d moniker; it seems very straightforward to me.\u00a0 Shorter and more delicate than their purpurea realtives, ambiguas have pale yellow flowers with the same tubular shape as other foxgloves’ blooms.\u00a0 Purpurea leaves are somewhat rounded, while ambigua leaves are elongated.\u00a0 Unlike purpureas, ambiguas are true perennials.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ambiguas are absolutely unambiguous about their desire to reproduce everywhere and anywhere.\u00a0 I distinctly remember planting a quart pot of D. grandiflora Ambigua in one part of my garden.\u00a0 The following year I found a plant twenty feet from the original.\u00a0 Apparently they play hopscotch at night.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It was inevitable that two foxgloves as prolific as D. purpurea and D. grandiflora would find a way to make beautiful music together.\u00a0 They did and the result was Digitalis x mertonensis, a strong plant notable for its strawberry-pink flowers.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This year I am also trying Digitalis obscura, which is shorter than the purpureas.\u00a0 Its flowers are the color of the sunset–yellow with a red overlay.\u00a0 I have some snapdragons that are the same color and I will use the new obscuras to create a color echo in the shade part of the garden.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We do not have deer issues–yet–but if we did, I would fill the garden with even more foxgloves.\u00a0 In the less shaded areas I would intersperse stands of foxglove with clumps of a low-growing catmint variety like ‘Blue Wonder’, which deer also dislike. I would add in some tall aconitum for late summer color and hellebores for spring blooms and evergreen groundcover.\u00a0 Then I would congratulate myself on having created a varmint-proof shade garden.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For a good selection of foxgloves, try Bluestone Perennials, 7211 Middle Ridge Road, Madison, OH 44057, (800) 852-5243, <\/font><\/font>www.bluestoneperennials.com<\/font><\/a>.\u00a0 Free catalog.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STANDING TALL \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Last week a tempest flew through our town, assaulting us with wind, rain and hail.\u00a0 Power lines came down along with tree limbs and occasionally, whole trees.\u00a0 The streets were strewn with debris and in some cases people didn’t get power back for days.\u00a0 When I inspected my own yard, I gave … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-spring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1684,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions\/1684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}