I am deeply grateful to my green-fingered mother for teaching me what a young foxglove looks like. If she hadn’t, I might well have missed a June spectacle: the monumental wonder rising out of the dirty gravel of my tiny urban garden. In their first year of growth, foxgloves look like the kind of tough, leathery weed that will come to nothing, easy to pull up without a second thought. Thank goodness I didn’t.
I’ve read that foxgloves can grow 6ft tall, but this one is 7ft at least, and still unfurling up past the washing line, knocking against the clothes pegs. As someone who has spent her whole life in the cramped sprawl of housing estates, foxgloves will always be an urban flower to me and a perfect one at that: high-rises growing in wasteland, not bothered by shade, by poor soil, by town planning.
