A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
foxglove
The foxglove is a tall biennial of woodland clearings, banks, and disturbed ground, growing a rosette of leaves in its first year and a spike of hanging tubular flowers, usually purple and spotted inside, in its second. The flowers open from the bottom upward. It arrives in numbers after a wood is cut or burned, because the seed can sit in the soil for decades waiting for light.
Etymology
The Old English name means, literally, fox’s glove, and it has meant that since the tenth century. The story that it was really folk’s glove, meaning the fairy folk, is a later and appealing invention that the documentary record does not support. The genus name is better reasoning: Digitalis is Latin for relating to a finger, because the flower fits over one.