Dreamy spıres

It’s time to sow foxglove seeds if you want to have towers of flowers next year

Foxgloves are among our most delightful native flowers, and a staple of cottage gardens for centuries. Flowering from late May through to July, they are the most undemanding of plants: easy to grow in sun or shade, needing minimal attention, and combining well with summer plants like roses, penstemons, alliums, poppies, campanulas and salvias. They are also rich in nectar and therefore wonderful for attracting pollinating insects into your garden – spend a few minutes watching a foxglove on a sunny day and you’ll see that bees find the flowers simply irresistible.

The native foxgloves, Digitalis purpurea, which you often see in woodland or on a shady bank, come in shades of pink, but foxgloves are available in many colours, though most garden centres and nurseries only stock a limited selection. Grow them from seed, however, and a whole world of possibilities opens up to you.

The only drawbacks to growing from seed are that the seeds themselves are so tiny you always end up sowing far too many, and that most foxgloves are biennials, which means that you Rusty foxglove, Digitalis ferruginea need to sow them this year to have them in flower next year. Now is the perfect time to do that.

Scatter the seeds onto the surface of moist compost in summer and they will germinate within two weeks. Once the seedlings are big enough to handle, you should ruthlessly thin them out

(or give them away to friends) and transfer the ones that you keep into bigger pots, before planting them out in their final position in autumn. Give them plenty of space, because foxgloves are big plants, growing to at least 80cm with a spread of 50cm. All parts of the foxglove are toxic if ingested, so make sure children know not to play with the flowers or leaves, and keep your pets away from the plants too.

One of my favourite foxgloves is the romantic ‘Sutton’s Apricot’, which looks particularly beautiful grown among pastel- coloured roses. A classic foxglove is the pure white Digitalis purpu- rea ‘Alba’, or try the eye- catching D. purpurea ‘Pam’s Choice’, whose dense spikes of white f lowers are flushed on the inside with a beautiful deep crimson.

Some foxgloves are short-lived perennials and will flower for several summers before running out of steam. Sow them now, in the same way as biennials, and they’ll be in flower by early next summer. Two of the best are Digitalis grandiflora, with flowers of a lovely buttery yellow, and D. x mertonensis, the strawberry foxglove, whose large mottled flowers are the colour of crushed strawberries. Or for something different, try the eye- catching rusty foxglove, D. ferruginea, with rounded flowers of reddish yellow, which grows to a towering 1.5m. Another variety you’ll rarely find for sale in garden centres is D. lanata, the woolly foxglove, which carries dozens of furry, yellowish-white flowers.

At this time of year, when so much is going on in the garden, it’s hard to find time for sowing plants for next year, but if you invest a few pounds in a packet or two of foxgloves seeds now, you’ll be rewarded next summer by dozens of graceful spires of flowers.

Digitalis x mertonensis Strawberry foxglove,