Question

Which plant is described by these clues? A sixteenth-century German herbalist coined this genus name in 1542 by turning his countrymen's word for a sewing thimble into Latin, borrowing the Latin noun for a finger. Each drooping tube is {zygomorphic}, foldable into mirror halves along one plane only, and hides four {stamens} in two unequal pairs against its roof, with the {ovary} riding free above the point where the {corolla} is attached. Every spent bell leaves a dry two-chambered {capsule} that splits down its seams to spill seed barely 0.004 to 0.008 inch (0.1 to 0.2 mm) long, never a set of four hard {nutlets}. Its species epithet is nothing but a colour word, the Latin name of the costly red-blue dye the Romans boiled out of Mediterranean sea snails. The first summer produces no stem at all, only a flat ground-hugging {rosette} of soft, wrinkled, grey-woolly leaves 4 to 12 inches (10 to 30 cm) long. In its second summer one unbranched stalk 3 to 6 feet (90 to 180 cm) tall carries its bells ranked down a single face of the {raceme}, and once the seed ripens the whole plant dies. Dark spots ringed in white freckle the pale floor of each tube, steering long-tongued bumblebees to nectar at the back, and the bells open from the bottom of the spike upward over four to six weeks. It colonises European woodland clearings, heath edges and acid roadside banks after felling or disturbance, and has run wild across the Pacific Northwest, New Zealand and Australia. Peer up into the wide, unobstructed mouth of a hanging bell and there is no bearded, sterile fifth {stamen} lying along the floor of the throat, only four fertile ones pressed under the hood. People have poisoned themselves brewing tea from its first-year leaves in mistake for comfrey, whose blades run down the stem in wings and whose flowers are small nodding cymes rather than a tower of open bells. In 1785 the Birmingham physician William Withering published 163 case histories of this plant after tracing a secret Shropshire family cure for dropsy to it, and the cardiac {glycoside} digitoxin from its leaves gave medicine a drug named directly after the genus.

Accepted Answer

Digitalis purpurea

Name That Plant #046