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.
I usually see foxgloves talked about as elegant, but to me they are sneaky, lanky things with a kind of unstable, teenage tallness, like the rough, grinning youths of our neighbourhood, or the town foxes who are said to have given foxgloves their name by wearing the petals on their paws to muffle any clandestine, night-time burglary. Foxgloves are heavily associated with fairies, but I suspect that here they would be the naughty kind, eager to steal your shoes.
My accidental, flowering tower block has the feel of being a city all its own. The main tower stretches tallest, but a wheel of smaller flowering stems also protrude from its base. I counted the number of individual flowers and gave up after I hit 300. Bees spend the day motoring in and out of its petalled rooms and a long parade of worker ants march patiently up and down its long length to fetch nectar. I’m told one plant can release more than two million seeds, and I watch the ripening seed pods now with a mischievous, fairy-like glee of my own.
May the whole worn-out neighbourhood soon be filled with these determined, useful high-rises, springing up everywhere they shouldn’t. How wonderful would that be?
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