Friday Flower Porn: Maybe a Doc Should Check Those Spots

The common foxglove Digitalis purpurea is certainly one to affect your heart. Literally.

i-9ae2eb151b5abba05fc02ef414e3fe64-foxglove.jpg

Foxglove is, of course, the source of the cardiac drug digitalin. Ingestion of foxglove can be fatal, so no munching, no matter how much you may be attracted to it. Symptoms may include nausea, hallucinations, and bradycardia (slowing of heart rate).

A much less toxic avenue to bradycardia (usually taken as a heart rate less than 60 bpm) is copious application of aeorbic exercise. Accompanying nausea is infrequent except at the end of particularly grueling races and any hallucinations tend to be pleasant.

This particular specimen inhabits our backyard with numerous brethren. We started several years ago with just a few plants and spread the resulting very tiny seeds about in following years. It now appears all over, sometimes popping up in spots I never expected. The originals were of the color shown above but subsequent offspring have ranged from near white to very deep purple-magenta. The flowers are covered with tiny hairs although they can only barely be seen in the photo (note the sun glint on the one in the lower left). The flower spikes routinely hit three feet in height and we have had some over five feet tall. For whatever reason, they seem to like it here and we're happy to have them.

More like this

So. It's National Poetry Month. Type that key phrase into the "search" query field on the main page of SB, and you'll find that April brings forth a veritable poetry slam among Science Bloggers.
One evening,  in the early summer of 2008, a Colorado sheriff's deputy named Jonathan Allen came home to find that his wife had made him a "special" dinner. Waiting on the table was his favorite spicy spaghetti dish and a big leafy bowl of salad.
Browsing through the most recent annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, I began to worry that my choice of reading material is becoming too dark. Didn't I used to relax with novels instead of lists of household materials used in suicides?