The plants that reseed this year and grow, will bloom next year...then die.
So in order to have a constant display of foxglove in bloom you also have to have next year's bloomers in place which are not blooming.
And that's the reason I don't grow fox glove any more.
Linda C

When my flower stalks are dead, I snip them off and either shake the seeds onto the ground or drop the stalks right there in the garden.

You have to plant seeds two years in a row, or both buy plants (bloom this summer) and put in seeds (for next summer) the first year. Then afterwards, you'll have half your plants bloom that season and half getting ready for the next one.

I do the same as Lorraine does - let this year's flowerstalks set seed, then cut them down and shake them over where you want the next set of lowers to be and/or lay the stalks on the ground. Sometimes you get lucky and the seedlings start early enough in the current year that you do get flowers the next year so that they seem perennial. And you have to recognize the seedlings when they appeal so you don't accidentally weed them out!

There is a perennial yellow type - Digitalis viridiflora - but it's not easy to find and you usually have to grow it from seed. D. parviflora is also a perennial but a rusty brown-orange that doesn't appeal to me.

Digitalis ambigua in soft yellow is also a true perennial. Not a tall plant but very attractive.

Well PM, from a zone 9 dweller for what it's worth..My foxgloves tend to be short -lived perenials here. If I deadhead them they will overwinter. I would typically get 3 years out of them. I always plant from nursey 6-paks in the fall. Mertonensis I have found to persist longer than Foxy or Shirley. This is probably totally irrelevant for NE !

Kathy in Napa

I vaguely remember about ten years ago planting some Digitalis lutea seeds, it made a glossy-leaved perennial with smallish pale yellow flowers. I liked it a lot, but haven't gotten around to planting it since I moved from that garden.

Around here foxgloves plant themselves, usually you get a bunch of babies around the mother plant. They're soft and fuzzy, not easy to mistake for most other seedlings really. I pull up lots of them every year. They're just the purple or white ones that have naturalized. Some get huge though, I had one eight feet tall last year. Sent my in-laws some seeds from that one, since they were so impressed with it. It also sent up some offshoots that flowered.

I don't have much luck with foxgloves reseeding in my garden. Last year I winter-sowed some white and also Foxy, which both bloomed the same season (first-year). The white were gorgeous! Almost five feet tall and hummingbird magnets. This year, nada. I can't find a single seedling from either one.

And I didn't WS any this year, figuring on reseeders. Darn.

However, I do have great success with d. grandiflora (which I suspect may be the same as ambigua???). They are nowhere near as large or showy, but very reliable, a beautiful soft yellow bloom, and long-lasting bloom at that - a good three weeks, at least.

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The grandiflora also reseed nicely for me. I find them all over the yard. Well, wait - I don't mean they are seeding everywhere and taking over the yard, but I mean I find them here and there, at quite the distance from the original plant.

No luck with mertonensis here. Can't get them to overwinter. :(

Last year, I also tried Spanish Peaks from Bluestone. It did come back this year, but is struggling. However, in my friend's garden it has come back two years in a row, and is doing very well.

:)
Dee

If foxgloves are dead headed after they bloom and before they set seed, they may come back the following year. You can never depend on it so the best thing to do is cut them back to the basal rosette when the flowers are 60% or 70% done. AND sew seed at that time. If needed you can move surplus plants the following spring. Extra work but they are so worth it. If you're lucky, you may find a Mom and Pop greenhouse that sells mature plants. I have one in my area that sells them ready to bloom for $3.95. Cheaper than some annuals.

Well....look at all the help I have on this question...thanks! Sorry to be so slow to respond. I think the heat has sucked all my energy the past few days. [g]

Linda and Lorraine... I have foxglove blooming this year and I also have some seedlings that I started from seed so I guess I am off to a good start. My dilemma is the current blooming foxglove have pretty large footprints in the border. I could add the seedlings around the base of them, but will the blooming foxglove just not be there at all next year and the seedlings will have the room to grow into their space?

If you hope to have them reseed on their own, I imagine mulch is a bad idea?

Woody... :-) Thanks for the name of the D. viridiflora...I will look for that! The rusty brown one is not appealing to me either. I think I have seen it called 'Milk Chocolate'.

tricia...I wasn't quite confused about volunteers coming up randomly. Rather I was wondering if the current foxglove plants that are blooming would come back as basal foliage next year and not bloom or if their place would be free for the seedlings to move into. I also enjoy volunteers.

oldroser...thanks for the name of D. ambigua. Didn't realize there were so many types.

Kathy.... Hello zone 9er. :-) Wow, is that a surprise that you find six packs of them. Never seen that here. Instead, they like to pot them up in gallon containers ready for bloom that year and charge you an arm and a leg for it.

jennie....an eight foot tall foxglove! Love to see a photo of that one. :-)

Dee...thanks for the photo. The grandiflora is different than I expected but very cute and healthy looking. Nice combo with nice textured hostas. My problem with the shorter ones, is that I have the space in the back where I need a taller version.

Beancounter...I had heard that about possible wintering over with early deadheading. I think I may select a couple and try that to see what happens and allow the rest to set seed.

Has anyone tried the Digitalis 'Candy Mountain' from T&M seed? Link is below.

Thank you all... :-)
pm2

Here is a link that might be useful: Digitalis Candy Mountain

Has anyone tried the Digitalis 'Candy Mountain' from T&M seed? Link is below.

Yes. The one in the sunniest spot is the only one blooming. I planted the seeds in deli dishes outside in a shady spot until they germinated, then put them in sun and misted last spring, then transplanted into plastic cups w/drainage holes, then used my bulb planter. This one is the only one blooming, then one storm was bad and it was leaning so I staked it. There are 4 or 5 more plants that aren't doing anything, some overshadowed by other plants, dug out a couple for my son. People are dazzled by this one. I'm going to try to get it to self seed by some of the suggestions I've read here. I don't have the best luck with T&M seeds, most don't germinate well for me, so if I can grow this, almost anybody can with moderate experience.

The leaves are a little mottled meaning it lacks some nutrients, was going to try some kelp on it but read just in time they don't like nitrogen so will leave it be for now. It's still blooming nicely with its first flush and I took that photo on June 5th when it had already been blooming for a few days. It was interesting to see all that foliage, then the stalks start to form and shoot up fast.

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I cut down the spent flower spikes after they bloom and get a couple of bloom cycles that way. Then in the fall I cut them down to the leaves. They over-winter for me but I'm in a warmer zone. I do have some come up as seedlings. I usually transplant them somewhere else. You can't have too many foxglove. : )

Diana

The photo is so pretty, I wish mine looked like that.

Has anyone tried D. lanata Woolly Foxglove? Know of a source for it in IL? Thanks.

redrumed, thanks about the photos. It was probably just luck. For every success I have 4 or more failures for sure.

Now I could have taken their choice, but I ordered from T&M on their sale and got that brown foxglove free. What on earth am I going to do with that if it grows?

I also ordered a 2 different packets of the yellow ones, hope one is the true perennial and that it grows.

I've got one more plant just starting to put up bloom stalks, more toward the shade, same side, beds line the front sidewalk to the house, and found another plant on the other side I forgot I put there. Maybe it will yet bloom as it's not in deep shade like the two I dug out.

I had some siberian wallflowers that went crazy which is probably part of the problem with blooming. Most had gone to seed by a few days ago so I cut them way down, so that might help the plants they were shading/crowding plus they may rebloom in the fall.

Actually if you don't have much going and like orange, I highly recommend those sib wallflowers. They bloom for a long period and make a real color splash before other perennials including roses and iris are ready to bloom. Also I found the perennial form of Baby's Breath, gyposophilia, they are thicker and taller this year but haven't bloomed yet. I think I got those at Seeds Trust but could be mistaken.

I'm waiting for my son to come get the two foxglove plants, and they don't seem to mind at all having been dug up several days ago and potted but it might be too late for them to bloom.

Raining AGAIN and the siren is going off. These constant rains are totally crazy we're having here in Iowa.

Okay, I lied. I lied big time.

I have thousands of foxglove seedlings! Okay, well, maybe hundreds...

I glanced in a bed last week which I haven't even touched so far this year, and was happy because I saw what I thought were chinese aster seedlings. I realized today, upon closer inspection, that not only are they foxgloves, but there are hundreds of them!

And another small bed, around the base of a big oak tree, needed to be weeded... or so I thought. I found that they aren't weeds, but more foxgloves! Hundreds more!

On one hand, I'm thrilled. On the other hand, I'm not sure what to do with so many! Can I move them? Should I wait till they are bigger? How big? And where the heck am I going to move hundreds of foxgloves to, lol?

I guess the down side is, they won't bloom till next year, so I'm still without foxgloves this year.

Dee

Dee...that is exciting! I had that problem with portulaca in a bed that I had 12 plants growing and dropping seed in last year. There were hundreds of seedlings. I was thrilled, because that is just what I wanted, for them to establish themselves and just do the reseeding for me each year.

I decided to just leave them as is and see how they did. So far, they are developing into a carpet of portulaca. They have not started to bloom yet, so the jury is still out. But the main thing is, that I am experimenting and trying what I thought would work the best and now I am observing and will go from there.

Didn't someone here mention, that ideally you need Foxglove seedlings two years in a row, so that they are blooming and setting seed every year and not every other year? Same thing with Honesty. I had no blooms this year, so I am stuck with every other year bloom unless I break the cycle. I will winter sow Honesty and Foxglove next year and have blooming plants and seedlings in the same year, so that they will then take care of themselves.

With winter sowing I had a lot of tiny seedlings in the bottom of a milk carton and used 'hunk of seed' to plant them, so that determined how many plants I ended up with and I put them where I needed them. There would be a few seedlings in each hunk, but the strongest one would edge out the others and I end up with one plant. I would think you can move them to where you want them, but I might wait until I could be sure of getting cooler weather. You might lose them if you dig them and move them and the next week you get a heat wave.

pm2

Well, I did some weeding today, and I've gone back to my original estimate - *thousands* of foxgloves, lol!

Some are quite large (four or five inches tall) and I may move those. Most of them though are very tiny. VERY tiny. I may have to end up moving them though in awhile, because many of them are under a rose bush, a viburnum and several other plants, etc. But even if I were to lose half of them, I'd still have them coming out of my ears, lol.

I guess I'll have to break the two-year cycle too!
:)
Dee

These yellow foxgloves (digitalis grandiflora) are very reliably perennial here in zone 4.
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The pink ones (digitalis purpurea) do not come back, in my experience. I grow them both from seed.

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Jan, as you can see from the post above, I have the grandiflora also, but yours look gorgeous with that blue flower! Is that delphinium? I have a few delphs (not in with my grandifloras) but they are not in bloom yet.

What is the light like in that planting? My grandifloras are in full, somewhat bright shade, with about 30 seconds of morning sun, lol. Would dephiniums grow in that situation? I'm new to delphs so I'm not too familiar with them.

Thanks,
Dee

Jan...what a gorgeous combo!! What is that dark shrub behind? I do like both your foxglove. Do you grow them from their own seed every year? You don't happen to winter sow do you?

pm2

They are especially pretty this year. I would guess this is about the third year for the yellow ones. I start lots of perennials on my somewhat sunny porch in winter and finish them in a greenhouse. I have winter sown with mixed results. Yes, the purple flower is a Magic Fountains Delphinium. It's dark purple with brown bees, so looks nice against the Diablo Ninebark shrub.

Your Diablo Ninebark is superb! I love the shape of the foliage and the fullness and really dark foliage. I have the SSWine which has the coppery color leaves and enjoy that too. I haven't seen that Diablo around very much anymore, but I love it!

Great garden...hope you will post more photos on the forums.

:-)
pm2

Is it common for these perennials to return each year, every other year or not?