Kitchen Garden Forum

Is it a monster?

Now I know this is primarily a vegetables forum, but I hope you will indulge me posting this photo I took yesterday of a peloric foxglove. I've seen several others in the past, but this is the first one I've caught on camera, and conveniently it is growing behind my neighbour's garage. If you save seed from one like this, the odds are about 3:1 of the offspring doing the same thing, I'm told. Not that you'd want them to, necessarily.

Dear Felix, a wonderful photo, i have yet to see one in the flesh, so to speak.

Hi Felix. Isn't is stunning? I had a foxglove which grew like this and it was amongst several others that were normal. I always left them to self seed in the garden but never had a repeat performance. I have never seen it since. Cheers.

I've just been having another look at it, to see if it has been damaged in the wind and rain (it hasn't). All the other foxgloves around it — and there about 40-50 — are quite normal, mostly pink, a few apple-blossom and a few white. I was intrigued to see that the peloric flower is of interest to bees. Looking at it closely, all the vital parts of it are intact: normal stamens, style and so on. I'll be monitoring it to see if if it forms a pod.

It looks like a very small Muppet wearing a very large ruff.

Look at that green face with the hooked nose.

I've got a lot of foxgloves growing in our front and back garden but sadly have never seen one like this. It's a delightful photo. Perhaps a bi-sexual bumble bee did some naughty things to a foxglove in the previous season and this is the end result!

It looks like a very small Muppet wearing a very large ruff

It must be like those dotted pictures you stare into, and a picture becomes apparent, i can never see them either.