echiums!

This must be the year for my prima donna plants to finally decide to bloom. First it was the first bloom for me of the Agave atten­u­ata over the win­ter. Now it’s this echium’s turn.

This is Echium wild­pretii, which has gone from five feet tall two weeks ago to over seven and a half feet.

It’s also known by var­i­ous com­mon names, includ­ing tower of jew­els, red bugloss, and–in Span­ish–taji­naste. “Taji­naste”: what a gor­geous sound­ing name, way more musi­cal than bugloss or “tower of jew­els,” which sounds a lit­tle square to me, like a plant name from a 1927 seed cat­a­log. Taji­naste is endemic to one Atlantic island, Tenir­ife, off the north­ern African coast.

This echium species is described as a bien­nial. Many plants described that way will put up leaves the first year and then bloom the sec­ond year from seed, after which the plants pro­duce huge amounts of seed and then die.

Although it’s been known to flower in the sec­ond year, this plant’s usual inter­pre­ta­tion of the term takes “bien­nual” lit­er­ally as “two years,” keep­ing you wait­ing that long from sow­ing to flow­er­ing. And there’s one plant in the front yard that looks like it’s going to be tak­ing an addi­tional year. Bien­nial? I think not.

Still, worth the wait, don’t you think?

The plant grows in spi­rals. Here you can see the spi­ral­ing new flowers.

The cen­tral rosette of leaves just a few months before send­ing up the cen­tral bloom stalk.

Dur­ing the two years you wait for it to bloom, you get to look at an attrac­tive mound of lance-shaped coarse gray leaves, usu­ally eigh­teen inches to twice that across dur­ing its sec­ond grow­ing sea­son. When nature with­holds flow­ers you can always look at and pho­to­graph leaves. So here’s some of my lit­tle crop of Echium wild­pretii plant photos.

Echium wild­pretii leaves in soft focus

Some of the leaves develop these neat hook ends.


As you can see it’s an attrac­tive plant even when out of bloom. It has low water require­ments and looks clean until its final, spec­tac­u­lar exit. After a few months it turns from a big dra­matic plant into a big dra­matic dead plant with ten­den­cies to top­ple even before its deep tap root decays.

Its rep­u­ta­tion is that it’ll send seeds every­where at that point, so this might not be the best plant if you live near the edge of a dry nat­ural area. A related echium, pride of Madeira, (E. can­di­cans) has estab­lished itself as a pest in some coastal areas of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. I’ll get to see how bad it really is after these plants finally give out later this sum­mer. I’ll worry about that later, but for now I’ll sit back and enjoy the plant.

June 03 2010 06:30 am | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography • plant profiles | Tags: • • •

9 Responses to “echiums!”

  1. Loree / danger garden on 03 Jun 2010 at 7:12 am #

    I LOVE this plant! I’m grow­ing a few this year and actu­ally it would be fine with me if it never bloomed, I love the foliage. How­ever I do like the idea of seeds every­where! I’m so bad at iden­ti­fy­ing seedlings though that I’d prob­a­bly end up pulling them out any­way. Your pic­tures are gorgeous!

  2. Loree / danger garden on 03 Jun 2010 at 7:22 am #

    I typed a ridicu­lously long com­ment and sub­mit­ted it and *poof* it dis­ap­peared. I seem to be hav­ing com­ment­ing issues on many blogs these days. So…I want to try and say again…great post with lovely pic­tures! I am grow­ing sev­eral of this Echium this year and while seeds would be nice I kind of hope it doesn’t flower…because I love the foliage!

  3. Elephant's Eye on 03 Jun 2010 at 11:30 am #

    A pinker, taller, pret­tier leaved cousin of my Paterson’s Curse. I have to catch the seedlings as soon I can see what they are. Won­der if you will have a prob­lem? Pride of Madeira is a cul­ti­vated gar­den plant in South Africa. Bit wary of it.

  4. Town Mouse on 03 Jun 2010 at 6:15 pm #

    Amaz­ing plant, though I’m not sure I’d want 500 of them (I’ve even refrained from plant­ing the native Oenothera for fear it will take over)

    thanks for the pictures!

  5. ryan on 03 Jun 2010 at 6:50 pm #

    Very cool. I’ve always wanted to plant one, but never quite found the right space. Seems like a really fun plant to watch it do its thing.

  6. Wendy on 05 Jun 2010 at 7:16 am #

    wow, what a show! Your pho­tos are great btw. I think you’d have to have quite a land­scape to be able to fea­ture this well. It’s quite a plant!

  7. lostlandscape on 05 Jun 2010 at 8:53 pm #

    Loree, thanks for your com­ments. You can see I finally fig­ured out the prob­lem with your notes not show­ing up. Still, I might be need­ing to fish them out of spam man­u­ally until there’s a new ver­sion of the fil­ter. I know exactly what you mean about some plants that you just wish wouldn’t bother to flower, and I’ve been plan­ning a post about that sometime.

    EE, with your cli­mate being so much like mine I can see how the pride of Madeira could turn into a weed. I some­times vol­un­teer at a local native plant gar­den where baby echium weeds keeps sprouting.

    TM, between the gophers and my for­get­ting to water­ing them, my orig­i­nal 24 or so seedlings dwin­dled to the 3 plants I have now. So it might not be awful if this plant self-sows a bit. I’m awfully attracted to our local Oenothera elata, but I’ve been a tad wary of it myself.

    Ryan, plants like these are really tricky to inte­grate into a land­scape. They don’t just stay there in a pretty lit­tle mound. And then they croak after 3 years.

    Wendy, I’m still fig­ur­ing out how to use this plant. It’s great as a spe­cial extrav­a­gant exhibit when it blooms, but it just sud­denly dwarfs all its neighbors.

  8. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » getting real on 06 Jun 2010 at 6:32 am #

    […] my last post, on my bloom­ing echi­ums, I was hav­ing a hard time com­ing up with an attrac­tive photo that showed […]

  9. Pam on 23 Jun 2010 at 6:47 pm #

    Wow. This is a real stun­ner (and your images are beau­ti­ful). I can see where you wanted to include it in your gar­den (and your ‘gag’ in your next post made me laugh!) — any­way, I’ve given up on a per­fect gar­den, and instead have turned it into a place where I enjoy watch­ing things grow and bloom (with­out all the expec­ta­tion). Those spi­ral­ing flow­ers — what fun. Can I (secretly) hope that it reseeds every­one so that we can see it bloom again in years to come?

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