As a child in Britain I used to delight in gathering the tubular flowers of foxgloves and using them as finger-puppets. The game was inspired, of course, by the plant’s curious name which still evokes the magic of the English countryside, as told in children’s classics like the Beatrix Potter stories.
Did foxes really use the flowers to warm their fingers on chilly days? The childhood fantasy ignored the fact the flowers emerged in summer, decidedly not glove weather but it was fun all the same.
Half a century on, I found myself gathering the crimson flowers of the foxglove again – but this time for a different reason. I was waging war against a plant that, despite of its sublime beauty and its place in myth and folklore, has become the scourge of the environment here.
Along with my fellow Waterworks Valley Bushcare volunteers I was weeding out invasive plants, especially the foxgloves, in the Waterworks Reserve.
All those years ago when I picked foxgloves in Britain, the European cuckoo always seemed to be calling, and the air around me and my schoolfriends was alive with the darting shapes of European swallows.
For the last Bushcare working bee of 2024, a cuckoo of a different kind, the fan-tailed, was calling and the swallows were also a local variety, welcome swallows.
Our first task was to strip the foxglove flower heads in the knowledge that just one stalk is capable of producing 10,000 tiny seeds. Then we pulled up the plants themselves, careful not to leave them on the wet ground where they could rapidly regenerate.
The Hobart City Bushcare officer co-ordinating the exercise, Bec Johnson, explained it was vital to get to the foxgloves quicky after they have been spotted because they had the capacity to extend beyond control. Such is the errant foxglove’s versatility, it has been found at the summit of kunanyi/Mt Wellington and at sea level on the West Coast.
As an invasive weed, the foxglove is particularly sinister because it has the capacity to kill native marsupial grasses in its immediate vicinity. When it dies it poisons the immediate patch of soil around it and nothing else can grow.
The dearth of the grasses deny native insects food and in turn insect-eating birds like our scarlet robins their invertebrate protein supply. As for pollen and nectar feeders, they avoid the toxic foxglove like the plague, as do the seed-eaters. The only insect to visit it is the bumble bee, also introduced from Britain.
The foxglove is not the only plant of my youth that I have attacked with vigour in the Tasmanian environment. I’ve also been known to take an axe to gorse, a serious problem to farmers in the drier areas of Tasmania but a protected and declining species in Britain.
How environmental priorities change at different ends of the earth.