618 



Digitalis purpurea. In dry hilly or heathy pastures, woods, 

 hedges, and on banks, by road-sides &c. ; common in many parts of 

 the Isle of Wight on the greensand and freshwater formation ; seldom, 

 if ever, to be seen on the chalk. Frequent about Ryde in various 

 places, but usually of small growth in this neighbourhood, which is 

 on stiff clay. Extremely common in most of the sandy districts of 

 the island, as about Shanklin, where, at Apse Castle, one part in par- 

 ticular of that picturesque spot is profusely adorned with this gorgeous 

 plant, w r hich there rises to a height of six and seven feet, displaying 

 one dense spike of blossoms for two-thirds of that length or upwards.* 

 Most abundant and luxuriant on the light soil of Bordwood Copse, 

 and on the sand and gravel about Newport. In the Undercliff, about 

 Cowes, Newchurch, Godshill and numberless other places, in plenty. f 

 Var. B. Flowers white. Here and there by accident, but very rarely. 

 About Steephill ; Mr. Albert Hambrough. A specimen or two found 

 by myself on the Wilderness, in 1842. The Foxglove is of abundant 

 and universal distribution over the whole of Hants, excepting, as be- 

 fore remarked, on calcareous soils, but from which I am not quite sure 

 that it is wholly banished. A variety with flowers of a flesh colour, 

 streaked with white, grows sparingly in a hedge betwixt Brown Down 

 and the Grange farm, near Alverstoke, — one specimen of which, 

 picked on the 14th of June last, presented some very singular anoma- 

 lies of structure, and in a morphological point of view was as enig- 

 matical as it was interesting. The specimen first arrested my attention 

 by the above deviation in colour from the ordinary state of the species, 

 and by the peculiarity of the lobes of the corolla, which were remark- 

 ably developed and regular, the upper lobe especially, as large or 

 larger than the lower one (not, as is commonly the case, much shorter 

 and truncate or nearly obsolete), the mouth of the corolla scarcely at 

 all oblique, and the entire flower looking very like that of some spe- 

 cies of Bignonia. In place of the field of areolate spots which usually 

 occupy the throat and superior part of the lower lobe of the corolla, 

 there was in this specimen a large irregular blotch, of a blood-red co- 

 lour, adding much to the strangeness and exotic aspect of the flower ; 

 but the most singular feature of the case escaped my observation, till 

 my return home in the evening, when, looking at the specimen by 



* In the highlands of Scotland I have seen the Foxglove still taller, and in De- 

 vonshire I measured a stem which was nine feet high. 



\ Mr. Thomson, a writer in Loudon's Magazine, vol. iii. (1830) p. 418, strangely 

 asserts that " of this beautiful but noxious flower the Isle of Wight scarcely boasts a 

 single specimen ! " 



