Part of Alnwick Gardens, away up north. I didn’t find this one due to my local knowledge of the English countryside, I pinched it from Not the Bee.

They were very taken with the Australian Gympie Gympie plant. “Apparently the plant was first discovered when an Australian road surveyor’s horse was stung, went insane, and dropped dead in about two hours. This thing literally kills horses in less time than it would take you to watch Titanic.”

I was more taken by a post from the regular garden, a mutant foxglove. In addition to the Bell Flowers evenly space down the stem, there’s one monster carnation-looking spotty flower at the top.

I googled around to see how common it was and discovered it is an “anomaly peloric monstrous terminal flower mutation caused by a double recessive gene at a locus called ‘centroradialis'”. Double recessive sounds pretty rare.

I ask because someone in my circle recently came back from Hong Kong with pictures of a different sort of mutant foxglove. Instead of evenly placed individual bell flowers down the stem, it had multiple clusters of, like, eight or ten bellflowers. It was neat.

This is something like it – but a warning before you click the link, the blog post goes from talking about mutant Foxgloves to talking about where to get Viagra and Cialis in the UK then back to foxgloves. Spam is afoot!

This one is close, too, and the link is to Mumsnet, so no funny business.

I have a bit of a thing about foxgloves. My grandmother had an old picture book of an enchanted garden with those creepy Victorian illustrations. I remember alllll the little fairy faces peering out of the bell flowers. No wonder foxgloves mutate.