In addition to the spectacular Echium candicans, you can occasionally find some smaller examples of the the genus. Because of the economics of the plant nursery industry, where people tend to buy stuff that’s in bloom over just about anything else, and because these plants have a relatively short–though spectacular!–blooming (read “saleable”) period, you don’t often see plants of them available. But seeds are a little easier to come by.

The J.L. Hudson catalog a little while back had four echiums available, including candicans (which there is listed under its fastuosum synonym). Of the others, E. wildpretii is occasionally sold in other seed listings, sometimes as “Tower of Jewels.” The plant is a beautiful rosette of long gray leaves the first year, about eighteen inches across, then in the second (edit, June 3, 2010: or third) year the plant shoots straight up six to ten feet with a conical tower of dark rose to carmine-red flowers.

Echium wildpretii, growing wild on the flanks of the Pico del Teide, a dormant volcano, on the island of Tenerife. Photo by Grombo, from Wikipedia. [ source ]

My yard, at 60-some by 120-some feet, is maybe a little larger than typical lots in town, but it’s still not huge. A plant that grows like the skyscrapers downtown–narrow but tall–makes a lot of sense for gardens like mine, so I bought a big packet of wildpretii seeds. Here are the baby pix of the fuzzy little guys, at something like four weeks old:

A little more warm weather–if it ever comes back–and they’ll be ready for the garden, ready to grow for a year in preparation for an outrageous flowering next spring. You don’t think a couple dozen or more of these rockets going off at once would be too much, do you?

From the Hudson listings I also got some seeds of E. russicum, similar in color to wildpretii and also a biennial, but something that’s more on the scale of a typical garden border. Enormous and fabulous is cool, but something that plays well with others should be nice to have around.