Fearsome Foxglove

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Jun 4, 2005

Let me thy vigils keep
'Mongst boughs pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.
from "O, Solitude!" By John Keats

Years ago I read a Christie story where someone accidentally gathered foxglove leaves along with the salad greens-to make a very nasty side-dish indeed! I didn't know what foxglove was at the time, but it sounded sinister enough. As in most mysteries, however, the "accident" turned out to be something else, though the culprit was not actually those leaves. Someone had taken the precaution of supplementing the unpredictable amount of poison in digitalis purpurea plants with the much more concentrated heart medicine made from the same.

Foxglove grows wild in England and, since a single plant can produce over a million seeds, it does sow itself prolifically in unexpected places. And, being a biennial, it only produces a low cluster of leaves during its first year. Still, I doubt that anybody would mistake it for lettuce, though it might be confused with comfrey.

Like many other cold-hearted beauties, this statuesque "fox" can be deadly. Perhaps it is that combination of beauty and danger that makes foxglove stand for "insincerity" in the Language of Flowers. But, to give the lady her due, she has probably saved far more lives than she ever took. As mentioned above, foxglove is the source of the medicine known as digitalis that both strengthens and slows the pulse. And it makes an effective antidote for aconite (monkshood) poisoning.

It derives its Latin name from digitabulum ("thimble"). Because the blossoms slip so neatly over the tips of human fingers, the plant was sometimes known as dead man's thimbles, fairy's thimbles, or lady's thimbles, not to mention bloody fingers, finger flower, fairy's glove, Our Lady's (or virgin's) glove, or witch's glove. The common name may be a corruption of folk's glove, since the "wee folk" were supposed to be particularly fond of this plant. Or "foxglove" might derive from the tradition that those mischievous sprites gave some sly predators conveniently-shaped flowers to muffle their stealthy tread.

Fairies aren't the only little beings who love this plant. As William Wordsworth wrote in "The Sonnet," "bees that soar for bloom,/ High as the highest peak of Furness fells,/ Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells." Other insects sometimes shelter from rain under the "roofs" of the flowers too.

The spots on those blooms are supposed to be the fingerprints of elves. In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, the heroine writes whimsically that having sought elves "in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling wall nooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth, that they were all gone out of England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population more scant."

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The copyright of the article Fearsome Foxglove in Historical Plants is owned by Audrey Stallsmith. Permission to republish Fearsome Foxglove in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.