The MGS Forum
Plants for mediterranean gardens => Trees and Shrubs => Topic started by: Alice on January 20, 2013, 10:24:31 AM
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Alisdair, at your talk yesterday at the MGS headquarters you showed us a slide of a really nice Echium with pink flowers, that you had seen in one of the Australian gardens recently. What was the species?
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Alice, it was great to meet you, and put a face to the "Alice" we've all come to know on the forum!
It was Echium wildpretii - a lovely plant, though you have to look quite closely to see the flowers. Here it is, whole plant, then a close-up:
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That's the one, thank you Alisdair.
It was great to meet you too and your talk was very enjoyable.
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Echium wilpretti is a biennial so it takes up quite a bit of room. It self-seeds well enough but I think it my cross fertilise with other species which are similar. I had seven plants of 'White Tower' but the second generation where very pale ice blue and not so close packed as the first generation. The third generation produced pale blue flowers and more open spires. The common shrubby Echium grows in many gardens here abouts so I wonder if the bees, which adore these towers of nectar, have been cross ppollinating them. tn
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That close-up photo of Echium wildpretii doesn't do the plant justice, as it can be vividly colorful from a distance as seen in California gardens. The various Echiums in the nursery trade all hybridize rather easily, and I wonder if the ones in the photo might not be a hybrid with E. pininiana, which does tend to have sparser blooms.
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David, You could easily be right in suggesting hybrid origin of that plant, but another possibility is that the one in my picture may have just been starting to flower at the time. I've just had a look at the much higher resolution original, and I can see literally hundreds of flower buds not yet opened on the plant.
Either way, I clearly haven't done the species justice, but you can at least get an idea of the colour from the individual flowers.
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I planted some Echium Candicans two years ago and they grew incredibly fast. Unfortunately the stems soon become woody and they were damaged by high winds last winter and never really recovered. Two nights ago the largest was totally decimated by gale force winds - the branches having been completely snapped off. All that's left is a stump where the main trunk was.