Biennial foxgloves can add charm to your garden beds

Foxgloves bring a cottage garden charm to any garden -- and they come up year after year.

Foxgloves are not perennials, but biennials, and, like other biennial flowers, they die in their second year.

But within the seedpod that follows each foxglove flower are thousands of seeds, each almost as fine as dust. As the plants begin to die, the seeds are scattered, then soon grow to form rosettes of leaves, leaves that are woolly and surprisingly tough when you consider the dainty seeds from which they originated.

The next year, beautiful spires, three feet high and studded with thimble-shaped, pale purple flowers, rise from the center of the rosettes. And so on, year after year.

If you never have had foxgloves in your garden, now is a good time to get plants started for a show next year, and for years to come. Perhaps you know someone who grows foxgloves; tap them on the shoulder and ask for some seed pods. Or just buy a packet of foxglove seeds.

After you have the plants once, you should never have to plant again because the plants self-sow all over the place. In fact, your only job in the future will be to get rid of excess plants.

A garden can have too many foxgloves, and even if that many foxgloves would look pretty, the plants do not flower well if overcrowded.

If you don't like the idea of plants hopping about the garden each year according to their whims, there are perennial foxgloves, and they stay where you plant them. Yellow foxglove is one such plant, with large, brown spotted, yellow flowers. The spikes of rusty foxglove soar to 6 feet, with fuzzy, rust-colored flowers along their length. Strawberry foxglove is notable not only for its summer-long show of strawberry blossoms, but also for its attractive, lush green foliage.

Just make sure to remove excess plants or those that choose to grow in the wrong place.