Wow! I didn’t know that...
The name ‘penstemon’ comes from the Greek, and means ‘five stamens’; it used to be spelt ‘pent-stemon’. Each flower has five stamens, one of which is sterile.
Penstemons have the common name of ‘beardtongue’, but why? In many of the flowers, some of the stamens (actually, staminodes) are extra-long and ‘hairy’, giving the appearance of an open mouth with a hairy tongue!
Penstemons are in the plant family Plantaginaceae (lovely word), and they are related to snapdragons (antirrhinum), foxgloves (digitalis) and hebes.
Penstemons were not described scientifically until botanist John Mitchell listed them in 1748.
Hundreds of penstemons were created and named in the late 19th and early 20th century. By 1900, the John Forbes nursery of Hawick, in the Scottish Borders, offered more than 500 different named forms.
Penstemons were once used by Native Americans to relieve toothache.
Slugs and other pests tend to avoid penstemons, but bees love them.
Two Royal Navy ships have carried the name HMS Penstemon. First, an Arabis-class sloop launched in 1916; latterly, it became a Chinese gunboat and was sunk in 1937. Second, a Flower-class small warship, designed for offshore patrol work, was launched in 1941.