Foxglove Beardtongue

Here's some Foxglove Beardtongue from last spring. This is a native wildflower with (somewhat) bell-shaped blossoms that's considered popular with all bees but especially favored by bumblebees. 

What a name, heh? It almost sounds like the name came from a random name generator that went on too long.

It's actually named after 2 different genera of flowers, the foxgloves and the beardtongues. Since Foxglove Beardtongue is a type of beardtongue but is not a type of foxglove, you should probably interpret the name something like "a beardtongue that resembles a foxglove". (Since both foxgloves and beardtongues are in the plantain family, perhaps it's not too surprising that there's a resemblance between the 2 [1].) What are the differences? This article (which seems to mix up species/genus a little) mentions several things, like foxgloves being from Europe and having bell-flowers that hang down while beardtongues are North American plants with tubular flowers that are more erect. Whether the Foxglove Beardtongue flowers are more bell-like or tube-like is debatable, and the flowers seem to hang slightly downward, so you can see why they seem to straddle the look of the foxgloves and the beardtongues.

Going back to the names, people have claimed that "foxglove" is a corruption of "little folks' glove", implying they were hand protection for fairies. This is unlikely since the word dates back to an old Anglo-Saxon term for "glove of a fox". Beardtongue has a more straightforward name derivation. It has an especially hairy stamen within the flower that made someone think of a hairy or bearded tongue.

June 15, 2023 at Sourland Mountain Preserve
Photo 300991971, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

[1] Of course, clover and Kentucky Coffeetrees are both legumes, and they're not exactly twins. Just like in human families, plant families can be weird sometimes.

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