Eye-Catcher for May

One year my Cornish friend and sculptor CaroleVincent gave me a couple of Echium cuttings from her Boscastle garden. The garden looks straight out to sea towards the Scilly Isles which is where these magnificent plants come from originally. They like conditions to be hot and dry and the soil to be sandy and pebbly. You can see them at their best in Tresco Abbey garden where their tall stately columns with tiny blue flowers crammed all up their stems reach around 10 or 12 ft. (3.5m to 4m). Bees of many kinds buzz around them all day long.

Echium pininana third year flowering

You wouldn't have thought, given their origins, that they would suit a heavy clay soil in  a heavily built-up city  but they have really taken to my garden. This particularly grand variety is Echium pininana, which is triennial. That is to say, it takes three years to mature from seedling to spectacular flowering and then dies.

First year seedling

Second year seedling

 From the first year of flowering here they have seeded themselves everywhere. I now keep a few seedlings and mostly allow them to grow where they choose, though occasionally I pot them up instead or move them to where they won't obstruct something I care about such as the red currant bush. I like passing them on to friends to try as well.  The self-seeding saves a lot of trouble if you want to to grow echiums  permanently in the garden - and I  do. I always wear gloves when handling them: the stems are bristly and can cause an allergic reaction.



The difficulty is keeping them going safely through the three years of maturing since they are susceptible to cold temperatures in winter. My  garden is fairly well protected, especially near the house, but I always cover their roots in winter with bubble wrap, fleece or some other insulating material and I have been known to form a fleece windbreak with upright bamboo poles and fleece round the second-year-old plant. But by this time it has grown rather large and unwieldy and  I'm not sure how well that really works.  Last year I thought I had found the perfect protection when my sister gave me the woolly insulating packaging from her weekly recipe box. But the foxes spied it and had a great time tearing it apart and scattering it in small scraps round the garden so I soon gave that up. In fact, I have found no use for this promising packaging - it is not a natural product - the birds have scorned it as nesting material and it doesn't degrade in the compost heap. Pity. But other than winter protection I don't mollycoddle them. They are independent souls, resent too much watering and can cope well with drought.

You might think they are rather overbearing for a small garden, but they are sculptural, evergreen (if you can keep them going) and actually make the garden more mysterious. They are endangered in the wild, which is another reason  for growing them.

While I'm about it, it's worth mentioning a smaller relative Echium candicans which is a perennial subshrub from Madeira, branched rather than columnar, Apparently it will grow to around 5ft (1.5m) or so but mine, in a pot, is much smaller. It is an even more vibrant blue and is also loved by bees.