Speckled daybeds

I can hardly pass a foxglove without pausing to gaze into these open gullets. (One of my earliest memories is of the flower spikes  towering above me on the hillside behind my first home.) 

Charles Darwin studied the plant, among many others, for his research into the advantages of cross- , over self-, fertilization and noted (quoting another naturalist Thomas Belt) that

Humble-bees [=bumblebees] can crawl into the dependent flowers with the greatest ease, using the “hairs as footholds while sucking the honey; but the smaller bees are impeded by them, and when, having at length struggled through them, they reach the slippery precipice above, they are completely baffled.”


So, only the large bumblebee species are able to trample over the guard hairs and with their long tongues reach the nectar beyond and by collecting pollen in the process distribute it as they move between the floral buffets.

This process is now well known and has been going on for millennia in those parts of the Old World to which foxgloves are native (Europe, Western Asia and NW Africa).  But I was astonished to discover that in those areas of the New World to which foxgloves have been introduced hummingbirds have taken on the role of pollinators.

"In many ways foxgloves are perfect for hummingbird pollination. Each flower produces a large amount of nectar and by growing in large stands they offer the supply that hummingbirds need to support their high energetic demands."
Researchers found that not only are hummingbirds just as effective as bumblebees in pollinating foxgloves, but the flowers are becoming larger to accommodate them. Natural selection in action: Charles Darwin would be thrilled!

(For more about this see here.)


Anne Stevenson wrote a poem called
The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves

Because hairs on their speckled daybeds baffle the little bees,
foxgloves come out to advertise for rich bumbling hummers,
who crawl into their tunnels-of-delight with drunken ease
(see Darwin’s chapters on his foxglove summers)
plunging over heckles caked with sex-appealing stuff
to sip from every hooker its intoxicating liquor
and stop it propagating in a corner with itself.

And this is how the foxflower keeps its sex life in order.
Two anthers—adolescent, in a hurry to dehisce—
let fly too soon, so pollen lies in drifts around the floor.  
Along swims bumbler bee and makes an undercoat of this,
reverses, exits, lets it fall by accident next door.  
So ripeness climbs the bells of Digitalis, flower by flower,
undistracted by a Mind, or a Design, or by desire.