As well as the ongoing Parent Problems, I've also been dealing with foxgloves behaving badly - as the following photos demonstrate:
This is "Weird Foxglove 1" from the 13th of last month.
I'm not sure what it's trying to accomplish.
This is "Weird Foxglove 2" also from the 13th of June. It started off promisingly apart from copying the unusual fold in the lower lips from Weird Foxglove 1...
... but then decided to go full on horror by turning its upper flowers inside out...
... and topped it off at the beginning of July with a deformed peloric terminal flower!
This Digitalis lanata (or possibly D. cariensis f. trojana - I can't tell which) couldn't be bothered to stand upright and lolled about over some other border plants before throwing up branching stems of yet more little of open mouths!
Here's a rather better behaved example growing upright(ish).
My chocolate foxgloves (Digitalis parviflora) are VERY late this year - they've only just started to put up flower spikes!
(Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that far too late in the season I pulled them out of their pot, ripped them apart and shook off almost all the dust like soil they had been neglected in before giving them fresh compost...).
Here are a couple of rather more upstanding and well-behaved examples of foxglove (which are putting the others to shame):
Digitalis x valinii 'Berry Canary'
Digitalis hybrida 'Rising Phoenix'
. . .
And, finally: On Monday morning I heard, from my home office window, what sounded like the muted squeaking of terrified guinea pigs. Looking out, I discovered a green woodpecker and its young (which was the source of the squeaks, I suspect) eating ants from my drive.
[Did you know, the green woodpecker's tongue is so long that they keep it coiled around the inside of their skull when not slurping up ants?]
Teenage Mutant Ninja Foxgloves! We've had some very odd hybrids appear from just one batch of seedlings in the past, but I don't recall any inside-out flowers or "deformed peloric terminals"... The rosy pink hybrids in the last two pics are a blessed relief. [NB our foxgloves, despite their cabbage-sized leaves, have yet to show even a bud, let alone a flower, mutated or otherwise!]
ReplyDeleteFab video of the woodpeckers - we have the traditional Great Spotted variety (although we haven't seen/heard them for a while since the two weed trees either side of the back of our garden were felled), but the Green Woodpecker normally prefers lawns and parks, so we won't see them very much in our immediate neighbourhood.
Jx
Some very strange doings but all beautiful anyway. What a great video of the woodpeckers! That’s exciting.
ReplyDelete