Plant Review: Digiplexis 'Illumination Flame'

If there were an award for most overhyped plant of the year, it would have gone to Digiplexis 'Illumination Flame.' This cross was supposed to combine the hardiness of Digitalis purpurea, the common foxglove, with the exotic beauty of its Canary Islands cousin, Isoplexis canariensis. While it was in breeding development, it appears that Isoplexis was reclassified as a section of Digitalis, which means the proper name of this plant should probably be Digitalis 'Illumination Flame,' but it had already entered the nursery trade as Digiplexis. These plants were everywhere in Northwest nurseries this year. Everywhere. I have never seen a plant rolled out into production and aggressively and uniformly pushed to market as this one.

Here's a shot from plants in my garden earlier this year. The plants are about 3 feet / 1m tall:

Digiplexis in happier times, blooming in the garden in July.

The foliage looks and feels very close to that of the common foxglove, and the growth habit is also similar. The flowers have pointier corolla lobes, however, more similar to those of its Canary Island parent. The color is lurid in person: rich buttery apricot in the interior of the floral tubes blending to hot pink at the tips. (My amateur photography does not do it justice.) The inflorescences last for several weeks and the plants readily sprout secondary spikes if dead-headed, although subsequent spikes are much smaller with fewer blooms. Curiously, bees were uninterested in the flowers in my garden, unlike common foxglove.

I fear the plants may not be as hardy as advertised and, unlike the Canary Island parent, are not evergreen. Supposedly they are hardy to USDA Zone 8, but a few days with temperatures dipping to 25° F / -4° C reduced my plants to brown mush. This was the result after a few weeks of typical Seattle winter rains:    

Same plants after a month of winter weather.

These same conditions would not have damaged common foxglove. Careful probing at the base of the plants suggests they will not be returning in spring. I'm leaving them just in case in an atypical act of optimism.

Verdict: Delayed pending potential reappearance in spring.