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Foxglove
13 June 2023
There is a place down the hill whose front lawns were replaced with a garden of wildflowers. Among them is this foxglove, which we came across late one afternoon when, to our surprise, we found a camera in our right hand.
Foxglove. Nikon D200 with 18-200mm Nikkor at 112mm (168mm equivalent) at f8, 1/320 seconds and ISO 200. Processed in DxO PureRaw 3 and Adobe Camera Raw.
Back at the bunker, we processed the DNG image file through DxO PureRaw 3 using DeepPRIME XD, which we are in the process of testing. That turned our 7.3-MB DNG file into a 28.2-MB DNG file, giving us a bit more to work with.
Camera JPEG. We rotated the capture, cropped it and darkened the shadows while preserving highlight detail and brightening the midtones.
A native of Europe, the plant has been cultivated since the 1400s before its introduction in North American in the 18th century, where it has done very well.
In Europe, the plant was imagined to be "fairy's gloves" or "fairy thimbles," which is charming enough. There are various theories about why fairies might want gloves (mainly not very nice ones) so the thimble argument won us over. They do look more like thimbles than gloves anyway.
In the Victorian language of flowers, a gift of foxgloves means, "I am ambitious for you, rather than for myself." As sweet a symbolism as any.
Besides the folklore and symbolism, its dried leaves contain digoxin and digitoxin, substances that stimulate the heart muscle. And incorporated in the life-saving drug digitalis. So it's useful too.
A person can do a little too much research, though. We discovered that other meanings include intuition, creativity and energy but also insincerity and pride.
So, you know, we just took a picture and let it speak for itself.