Foxgloves and Bees on the Booze

Before the rain settled in for the weekend, we strolled over to the Central Park Conservatory Garden. The spring bulbs had already been dug up and were being given away last time we visited, and the new plantings weren’t in yet. Still, there was plenty to enjoy. The day was windy, and the foxgloves shivered too much for a good photograph—so I turned instead to language and poetry.

Foxglove

Where does the name come from? Foxhound, foxtrot, and foxhole make sense, but gloves for foxes? They do grow wild in the rough, shaded places foxes favor for dens, but foxes don’t wear gloves. The tubular bells climbing the stalk look like thimbles, and that resemblance inspired the German botanist Leonhart Fuchs to name the plant Digitalis, from the Latin digitus (“finger”), echoing the common German name Fingerhut—”finger-hat,” or thimble. Turns out that the etymology is hotly contested and steeped in folklore, myth, and mythology.

The Poets

Wordsworth, in one of his more preachy moods, uses the foxglove as an emblem of contented constraint:

Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is …

It’s a bit too neatly self-justifying. He goes on to praise the sonnet’s “scanty plot of ground” and assumes nuns, hermits, students, maids, and weavers are equally blithe about their confinement. One suspects many of them might have told him otherwise.  I’m a Wordsworth fan but it’s no accident that he features prominently in The Stuffed Owl, D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee’s celebrated anthology of bad verse—or verse by good poets at their worst. He even supplied its title.

Emily Dickinson is the antidote and she arrives like a snort of smelling salts.  Where Wordsworth’s bee murmurs serenely inside the foxglove bell, Dickinson’s bee is being thrown out of it:

I taste a liquor never brewed (207)

I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol! Inebriate of Air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro’ endless summer days –
From Inns of Molten Blue –
When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door –
When Butterflies – renounce their “drams” –
I shall but drink the more!

The poem is sly, irreverent, and wicked. Dickinson doesn’t just push back at Wordsworth’s pious contentment—she tips it upside down. The foxglove bell isn’t a place of serene murmuring; it’s a dive bar at closing time.

The Close-Up and the Sex Life of the Foxglove

Looking into a foxglove bell is one of the small wonders of the world. Searching for a photograph, I came across Ray Cannon’s wonderful post Bumblebees and Foxgloves, which explains exactly what is going on botanically: a speckled landing pad with guiding hairs, the whole shape perfectly engineered for bumblebees over millions of years of mutual adaptation. 

The post ends with a poem by Anne Stevenson that earns its place alongside Dickinson—not just capturing the plant’s botany but reveling in it:

Stevenson’s language is doing several things at once—”hooker” is botanically precise (it refers to the curved hairs inside the bell) while landing with exactly the comic weight she intends. The foxglove, it turns out, has engineered an entire economy of intoxication and cross-pollination, and Stevenson renders it with the same gleeful irreverence Dickinson brought to the bee. You can read the full poem here.