Dreamy spires of summer

Blazing like summer wildfire along forest rides and waste ground, foxgloves tell a marvellous tale that blends old folklore with modern, life-saving medicine, says Nicola Chester

- Nicola Chester

Nothing captures the deep, seductive languor of high summer quite like the nodding purple-clustered spires of foxgloves. Whether they're waving shadily at the back of a cottage garden, enchanting a midsummer woodland glade or spectacularly crowding forestry clearfells, railway embankments or a forgotten patch of rough ground behind the supermarket, foxgloves are as recognisable and loved as they are feared.

Summer walks as a child beside my formidable Northamptonshire Nan were punctuated by floral wisdoms. The roadside racemes of tumbling, tubular bells would always get a nod and "thar'll raise the dead and fell the living!" Every part of this cardiac curative is also poisonous.

Flowering from June to September, foxgloves are a valuable source of nectar, and the leaves and flowers are eaten by moth caterpillars, such as the foxglove pug and yellow underwing. But foxgloves have a particular relationship with bees, their premier pollinator - especially long-tongued species such as the common carder. The surly, protruding lower lip of the down-sloping bells acts as a landing pad. Dark spots inside each flower's pale throat act as guiding landing lights, detected by a bee's ultraviolet vision.

To encourage cross-pollination, foxgloves have evolved to maximise a bee's methodical foraging style. The lower flowers - which are female-open first and as the bee pushes up the corolla tube to sip the nectar at the back, it is covered in pollen. Once it reaches the still-closed male flowers, it flies to the bottom of another plant to begin again, rattling and ringing the clapperless bells. When the flowers have been open a few days, the pollen-bearing stamens wither and the receptive male style protrudes to accept pollen deposits from another plant.

COTTAGE GARDEN DELIGHT