DESCRIPTION:
- NAME: Tower of Jewels
- OTHER COMMON NAMES: Red Bugloss / Tenerife Bugloss / Mount Teide Bugloss / Wilpret's Bugloss
- SCIENTIFIC NAME: Echium Wildpretii / Echium Bourgaenum
- COLOR: Maroon, Cranberry, Ruby Red
- PLANT SEEDS: Outdoors after frost / Indoors weeks before last frost
- BLOOM TIME: Summer
- HARDINESS ZONE: 9 - 11
- PLANT HEIGHT: 5 - 10'
- PLANT SPACING: 36 - 48"
- LIGHT REQUIREMENTS: Sun
- SOIL & WATER PREFERENCES: Average - Dry
OTHER:
This rare stunning beauty comes from Tenerife Island, one of the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco. Both the foliage & the incredible flower spikes are lovely & impressive! Their conical towers can reach heights of 6 – 8’ tall, covered top to bottom with hundreds of blooms. The funnel shaped flowers are high in nectar, & will attract bees, butterflies, & HUMMINGBIRDS. Echium Wildpretii has won a Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit, & is my new favorite plant!
They are a biennial, meaning they will flower in their second year, but the large 2-3’ wide basal rosettes of silvery foliage you will enjoy in their first year are lovely enough that you would still want to plant them even if you didn’t know the best was yet to come. Lol. And more good news – they will reseed themselves, so once established, you will be able to enjoy flowers every year. The plants are deer resistant, tolerate coastal conditions, sandy or rocky soils, dry spells, high temperatures, & even temperatures as low as 25*F.
