PlantFiles: Foxglove, Fairy Thimbles, Dewflower, Wild Belladonna, Beardtongue, Showy Beardtongue
Penstemon cobaea

This is a great perennial native wildflower that can move right into the garden also! It can tolerate drought and poor soils. Large pale lavender blooms appear every spring and attract hummingbirds.

This is the largest-flowering native Texas penstemon (also found in Arkansas and Nebraska) ranging from the rolling plains and blackland prairies to the Gulf of Mexico. Much of its life is spent in a rosette form but for about 2 weeks in April or May it sends up 1-1.5' bloom stalks of white to pale pink, lavender, or rosy purple and the open flowers might cover two-thirds of the stalk. It works well in the middle of garden beds where the shrunken rosettes can be shaded by other taller, more vigorous plants in the summer. They are short lived perennials (3 to 4 years) so many people simply spread the seeds in the summer when they cut the flowered stalks off. It grows very easy from seed (blooms second year for me). Tolerates sand, loam, clay, and limestone soils as long as they are well drained.

This plant is certainly able to grow in zones 7-9 and I grow them at 9" spacings with no problems.

Foxglove (Penstemon cobaea) is also known as fairy thimbles, dewflower, wild belladonna, beardtongue, showy beardtongue and balmony. It is found on dry open prairies and eroded pastures and hillsides, slopes, bluffs and edges of creeks on chalk loam, limestone loam, gypsum loam or sandy loam soils. It is an upright, hairy perennial that has a thick, tuberous root. This root assists with its surviving scorching dry summers. In the summer, it whithers down and appears to be dead. In late winter, a thick, compact clump of leaves and a tall stem laden with buds emerges. It produces very large, 2" long, tubular white to violet to deep purple flowers (largest blooms of any native penstemon).and is pollinated by large bees which need to crawl inside the corolla tube. That is why the filaments of the four stamens are curved and rigid in order to prevent the corolla tube from collapsing. The long style sticks out past the lip of the corolla. This penstemon attracts a variety of moths and nectar insects, hummingbirds and butterflies. It is a larval host for the dotted checkerspot butterfly. Collect seed in summer when capsules are brown and seeds are black. Germination is best with cold-moist stratification. It may be propagted from herbaceous stem cuttings also. Foxglove is suitable for rock gardens, native plant gardens, wildscapes and other cultivated areas. Root rot can occur in wet, poorly-drained soils.