Wharfedale is in the grip of a midsummer daydream. Woods are tropically dense, the air is hot and heavy, and the sun is a humid smudge. Oxeye daisies foam up in great hazes from roadside verges and riverbanks. Lanes smell of honeysuckle, dog rose and lemony elderflower. People jump into rivers and couples canoodle under waterfalls. The world brims with a narcotic sense of possibility, like reality is becoming untethered at the edges and blurring into fantasy.
Even amid all this, the heart-stopping pink flowers of the foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) still manage to shock the eye. The time around the solstice is said to be when the veil between worlds is most porous, which would explain how this plant managed to slip into ours; its ubiquity, its “ordinariness”, does nothing to allay its strangeness.
On a hazy hillside above Bolton Abbey, as the day slips into a long evening, the outrageous spikes rise up from the messy margins of fields dotted with machine-wrapped hay bales, a faintly subversive reminder of nature’s irrepressibility. Like the vilified animals from which they take their name, foxgloves thrive in the inbetween spaces; bracken-covered banks, furtive woodland glades and rough pasture.
The ostentatious beauty of the bell-shaped blooms, which dangle from the sides of lolling spires, is matched by their toxicity; I find they trigger a kind of instinctive caution, too bright to be benign.
This tension animates much of the literature and folklore surrounding the plant, particularly among the Romantics. Mary Webb wrote: “The foxglove bells, with lolling tongue, / Will not reveal what peals were rung / In Faery”. In Wordsworth’s play The Borderers, a beggar recounts a dark dream in which her baby, delighted by a foxglove flower, uses it to trap a bee, and then dies. Yet the active principles of the plant have long since been isolated for medicinal purposes and are now commonly used as heart stimulants; foxgloves literally have the power of life and death.
It is a day for being drunk on the world, but like the solstice itself, the dual nature of the foxglove is a reminder of the inseparability of opposites. Enjoy it while it lasts.
