Digitalis ferruginea (rusty foxglove)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Digitalis ferruginea, photographed by Emanuele Santarelli — fig. a Emanuele Santarelli, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2019-08-18 / obs. 48596827

Digitalis ferruginea, photographed by Kostas Zontanos — fig. c Kostas Zontanos, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 10730315

Digitalis ferruginea, photographed by Nicholas Moray Williams — fig. d Nicholas Moray Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 90082041

Digitalis ferruginea, photographed by Conrad Altmann — fig. e Conrad Altmann, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 46162904

Digitalis ferruginea, photographed by Santiago Martín-Bravo — fig. f Santiago Martín-Bravo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 101705008

Digitalis ferruginea, photographed by Andre Hosper — fig. g Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 21293312

Digitalis ferruginea, photographed by Tony L. Price — fig. h Tony L. Price, CC0 1.0 / obs. 171595707

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 12 botanical countries

Native distribution of Digitalis ferruginea, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Bulgaria	BUL
Greece	GRC
Hungary	HUN
Italy	ITA
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Romania	ROM
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
Lebanon-Syria	LBS	ASIA-TEMPERATE
North Caucasus	NCS
Transcaucasus	TCS
Türkiye	TUR

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 83 in flower of 96 examined

98%

83%

67%

Proportion of examined Digitalis ferruginea in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	0	1	too few examined
May	0	0	too few examined
Jun	1	1	too few examined
Jul	45	46	98%	89% to 100%
Aug	33	40	83%	68% to 91%
Sep	4	6	67%	30% to 90%
Oct	0	1	too few examined
Nov	0	1	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Digitalis ferruginea observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 83 of 96 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 7 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Digitalis aurea Lindl.
Digitalis brachyantha Griseb.
Digitalis ferruginea f. membranaceoviolacea Sigunov
Digitalis ferruginea subsp. schischkinii Werner
Digitalis ferruginea var. parviflora Lindl.
Digitalis pichleri Huter
Digitalis schischkinii K.V.Ivanova

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.