Digitalis purpurea 'LUCAS WHITE'

Common foxglove is a European native and is found marginally in our country, too. Its flowers are so attractive that breeders keep hybridizing them and every now and then they introduce a new, improved variety. These improvements usually involve not just pretty flowers, but mainly the plants’ life span – in the wild common foxglove is a biennial which needs one whole year for plant maturation to produce flowers the year after. No one is so patient today, therefore, new varieties are hybrids eliminating the waiting part so they either flower in their first year or they behave like clumping perennials without a need for self-seeding.

Lucas is a small foxglove series offering extended blooming time, various flower colours, and in one case also silvery foliage. Lucas White, however masculine the name sounds, is more like a bride dressed in the most elegant and beautiful wedding dress. Its creamy white flower buds burst into pure white tubular flowers with less conspicuous, pale chartreuse dots inside the throat. The first flowers are borne along about 60-70 cm tall stems and while they keep opening, secondary stems are growing from the ground. They reach some 30 cm and also bear flowers. Lucas is a short-lived perennial or a biennial which needs to set seeds for another generation and bloom in its second year.

Leaves are smaller and thinner than those on most other foxglove varieties, broadly lance-shaped, mid green, conspicuously veined. Foxglove is a medical plant but also quite toxic. Even though it does not make any fruit-like berries that would attract children, it is not recommended for mass plantings near playgrounds, school yards, or kindergartens.

Foxglove will grow in almost any soil apart from too wet or too dry. In the wild it is found in humus-rich soils in light woods and its margins, which means that it will love partial shade in your garden, or full sun if kept moist. Excess fertilizing may result in production of enormous leaves but no flowers. Hardy to about -34 °C (USDA zone 4).

Last update 06-06-2024.