Foxes are having a moment of popularity now – it seems like every hipster strolls their urban street sporting a coffee mug or phone case or t-shirt with a cute little fox face peering from it. Fair enough. Foxes are endearing and so are their namesake plants, like giant foxtail.
Foxtail plants grow up mid-summer and last outside all fall and winter, starting out green (sometimes with streaks of warm purple on their stems and bottle-brush seed heads) and bleaching out to buff by the time snow flies.
I gathered up some foxtail when I first saw it pop up in July, excited to photograph its elegant curves, but I learned that there’s a trick to posing these guys in a vase – each one leans in only one chosen direction and is not willing to change that direction to please a photographer. If one grew up tilting to the left and you try to flop it over to the right, it will do a gentle pirouette in the vase and viola! Back to the left. It seems like there’s an easy fix – just turn it around 180 degrees, right? In theory, yes, but when you’re weaving the stems around and against each other in a vase to get all the spires to work together as an arrangement, the whole organization gets complicated pretty quickly.
By the end of the day, my foxtail patch had been raided several times so I could find ones pointing in the correct direction to make the arrangements balance out. No hardship. Foxtails are pleasant companions and there are many worse things than spending an afternoon with them.
Giant Foxtail, Setaria faberi
Shoot date: July 30, 2019
Possible use as a cut flower: Foxtail, like most other grasses, is happy to hang out in a vase! Keep ‘em dry and they look really cool.
