Foxgloves are the plants growing wild in front of your dog’s front paws, and undoubtedly a hundred other places in the garden as well. If you’re on a tight budget you can’t beat free.
There’s an interesting etymology to the word foxglove. As foxes do not wear gloves (though often steal them) it has nothing to do with them. Rather it is a corruption of folks’ gloves as in little folks or fairies. The flowers are actually fairies’ gloves
I'm not convinced they're foxgloves. I think they might be green alkanet (Pentaglottis sempervirens). It's difficult to tell from the photo but some look to have white speckles on the leaves. A surefire way of telling the difference is that foxgloves leaves feel soft, alkanet leaves are abrasive. I have both and have got good at telling them apart by sight. But if I'm ever in doubt, a quick feel confirms it one way or the other.
'If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.'
I suspect LG may be right, although it could be mud spatter on the leaves.
If you are absolutely set on keeping the rockery, you need to dig it all out, group the stones rather than have them spotted along like a raisin pudding, then plant up with things like geranium Rozanne, as suggested, bulbs, helianthemum, oriental poppies, geums, erigeron. And then mulch heavily with grit or gravel between the stones. But as has been said, that sort of garden needs a lot of maintenance, at least in the first couple of years until the plants are established. A tenant probably won't care for it well enough and it'll revert to a weed heap
Gardening on the edge of Exmoor, in Devon
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
I think you really need to factor that this " rockery" is always going to be a high maintenance nuisance to weed and keep "cute". Will your new tenants be up for it? I'd remove and seed it.
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There’s an interesting etymology to the word foxglove. As foxes do not wear gloves (though often steal them) it has nothing to do with them. Rather it is a corruption of folks’ gloves as in little folks or fairies. The flowers are actually fairies’ gloves
If you are absolutely set on keeping the rockery, you need to dig it all out, group the stones rather than have them spotted along like a raisin pudding, then plant up with things like geranium Rozanne, as suggested, bulbs, helianthemum, oriental poppies, geums, erigeron. And then mulch heavily with grit or gravel between the stones. But as has been said, that sort of garden needs a lot of maintenance, at least in the first couple of years until the plants are established. A tenant probably won't care for it well enough and it'll revert to a weed heap
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
Will your new tenants be up for it?
I'd remove and seed it.