The foxglove is known in France and Germany, and in some parts of England, as the “flower of the finger”, because of its resemblance to the finger of a glove, an analogy which poets did not fail to take advantage of. William Brown describes Pan as looking for gloves for his lady here:
To keep her slender fingers from the sun,
Wandering pastures often have runoff
To rip the spotted foxes’ gloves off her leg,
And on those fingers put it neatly.
Left, transplanted foxglove. Well, the “five living fairies” rhyme and finger play.
fairy hats
Did you know that foxgloves grow long spines of thimble-shaped flowers, beautifully speckled on the inside? And did you know that these flowers will fit on your fingertips like tall hats on the heads of little fairies?
Maybe there are foxgloves growing in your garden right now. If there are, pick five flowers from the stem, and choose a large one for your thumb, and a small one for your little finger; The size of the others should be between these two.
Turn these flowers upside down and they instantly become fairy hats. Put the caps on all five fingers of your left hand. Then on your fingers, just below the hats, draw little faces with pen and ink. Now you have five live and moving fairies who will do all sorts of things and be very excited about it. They’ll nod your head in joy, they’ll bow in formal greeting, and they’ll put their little heads together to plot some mischief.
They can be fairy kids at school, if you will, with the teacher’s plump short thumb fairy; And you can make the imaginary pupils stand close to each other, shoulder to shoulder, and then, at the teacher’s word, separate and stand alone again.
It would be fun to name the fairies, such as peppergrass, mustard seed, and cottonseed, and with the teacher standing in front of his class, have him call a roll and have each fairy bob his head as he answers his name.
Perhaps you want the teacher to ask each pupil to sing a little song or to recite a short verse. When the fairy does this, he steps forward in front of the others, and stays in that place until he is finished. Here is a beautiful verse for a fairy covered in roses to read: “ Beard sisters
“I wonder what Clover thinks,
BoboHnks’ bosom friend,
Lovers of skinny and white daisies,
Waltz with Buttercup at night.
Oh, who knows what Alfalfa thinks?
no one ! Unless it’s Populinix.”