Folklore Friday: Foxgloves

a flower of many names

Sep 13, 2024

Hello, friends! If you’re a paid subscriber, you already know that poisonous plants are featuring in the remainder of 2024’s Folklore Friday poems. Eventually I’ll organize my Substack so that my posts will be easy to find by subject (fingers crossed), should you want to look back over this year’s Folklore Fridays, but for now here is one I wrote about contrary little sunshine death flowers.

Foxglove is an easily recognized plant. We know it’s poisonous and shouldn’t be handled unless you really know what you’re doing, and then only with gloves.

I was looking for some kind of spooky or mysterious folklore to inspire today’s poem, since we are in the darker half of the year. But I kept coming back to fairies, yet again.

This isn’t really surprising, since the name ‘foxglove’ is believed by some to come from ‘folk gloves’, referring to gloves of the Good Folk or fairies. There are many little tales and tidbits connecting this poisonous plant to fairies. There are also a bunch of other names associated with foxgloves:

A whole host of alternative common names reflect the association with fairies[:] Fairy Caps, Fairy Gloves, Fairy Thimbles, Fairy Herb, Fairybells, Fairy-fingers, Goblin Gloves, Fairy Petticoats, Fairyweed. ––from Everyday Nature Trails

The above website has even more names, some of them humorous, and I suggest checking it out if you’re curious.

Today I’m sharing a few minisons (not minions, as it keeps autocorrecting to). Minisons are short for mini sonnets, a recently created poetic form consisting of fourteen letters. I credit my friend Caitlin Gemmell, who has had several of hers published, for introducing this poetic form to me. I hope you enjoy them.

I gathered my inspiration from the above website and from this post from Icy Sedgwick. I recommend reading them, especially if you aren’t familiar with the Doctrine of Signatures.