Foxgloves - Wench Ford

Digitalis Pupurea (Fairy Gloves, Fairy Bells, Floppy Dock, Tod- tails)

The Foxglove defines the end of Spring and the beginning of high summer. It grows amongst the bracken at edges of heaths, on steep banks and in glades in acid woods as here at Wench Ford in The Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire.

The Foxglove was once used widely in folk-medicine despite it’s high toxicity. In the eighteenth Century the botanist and physician William Withering discovered the use of the foxgloves ingredients digitoxin and digoxin which are still widely used today as heart stimulants.