Foxglove

The foxglove is a biennial: a first year spent as a quiet rosette of leaves, a second spent throwing up the tall spire of thimble flowers, opening from the bottom rung upward like windows lighting in a tower.

Each flower is built as a tunnel for long-tongued bumblebees, freckled inside with guide marks that lead the bee over the anthers. Watching a bee disappear entirely into a flower and reverse back out is one of the small theatres of summer.

Every part of the plant is poisonous, and yet from it came digitalis, the heart medicine that steadied cardiac care for two centuries. The plate is beautiful; the botany is deadly serious.