I confided my ambition to a friend who, although himself a teacher of botany, had never included in his research the subject of "Sports." This botanical expert took great interest in my "Sport"—watching it with me from day to day.
Alas, vain were my hopes of giving to the world a new flower!
The radiate Foxglove declined the honor of reproduction; dropping its mottled petals, and slowly shrinking away without forming a seed pod!
A queer characteristic of the "Sport" was thus asserted in the English article before mentioned: "When a plant sports, all plants of its kind, wherever growing, also sport." Now one may admit the fact of a single plant having (as it were) flown in the face of Mother Nature, but when it comes to the whole family—"all the aunts and cousins," from Dan to Beersheba, joining in the frolic, one can but wonder and doubt the Munchausen-like statement.
Calling that summer on a Cambridge friend (a member of our Plant Club, whose flower-garden is a miracle of beauty):
"One of my Foxgloves has sported," I proudly boasted. "So has one of mine," she said, "and it is the first sport I have ever seen."
So the magazine statement was, after all, believable! Yes, away across the Atlantic, in English gardens, the Foxglove—obedient to this marvelous natural impulse of its being—was trying its hand at a radiate flower! I find it well that my sport did not germinate, since the regularly formed Foxglove suits the tall spike "to a T," and is far lovelier than any freak of a flower could be.
Since making a record of my Foxglove sport I have learned that this flower often produces at the tip of its blossom stalk an abortive radiate flower. I wonder if the Foxglove did not originally start out as a radiate, and if this freak is not a wild tendency of the plant to escape that evoluted form (which is its civilization) and lapse into its primitive barbarism?
The Foxglove comes in bloom late in June and continues flowering about four weeks.
Though classed as a biennial, it sometimes lingers on through a third summer, and continues flowering.