There is a story about me and this family, the borage family. One day while working in the Salinas Valley, a gentleman called me over and asked if I could identify the strange plant growing in his yard. It was almost three feet tall and he swore to me he had no idea how it got there. I must say I had never seen anything quite like it.
It turns out it was something called Tower of Jewels (Echium wildpretii), a real curiosity hailing from Madeira and the Canary Islands. Apparently it does well in our Mediterranean climate and is planted in gardens for its aesthetic Dr. Seuss qualities. As for how it got in that man's yard, the answer is birds. The red flowers attract bees, butterflies and birds, the latter of which spread the seeds haphazardly.
Around the same time, I took notice of a very distinctive shrub that suddenly seemed to be everywhere I went in central and southern California. The shrub is called Pride of Madeira (Echium candicans). It belongs to the same genus as Tower of Jewels (Echium) and hails from the same place (Madeira). And as this photo taken in Venice CA shows, the blue flowers are very, very striking.
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