Echium: cultivation care and curiosity

If you are here it is because walking in a park or in the neighbor’s garden you have noticed this plant, the Echium, and it was love at first sight that you decided to plant it in the garden, but first you want to know more about its characteristics main. This is the right place, in fact we will try to investigate first and foremost its main characteristics and then its cultivation methods, etc. Well let’s start.

Let’s start by saying that Echium is a plant belonging to the Boraginaceae family and therefore to the so-called perennial herbaceous plants. Used thanks to its main characteristics as an ornamental plant, in fact, the stems can measure up to one meter in height, composed of oval leaves covered by a thick white hair, sometimes silver. Its main peculiarity is the deep blue or red flowers that give that magic and pleasant touch to the human eye. The perfect time for Echium flowering is spring and summer.

Cultivation and methodologies

To have a correct and abundant flowering the Echium plant requires a bright and quite sunny area and, fundamentally, it must be sheltered from the strong wind.
Furthermore Echium has the peculiarity of adapting to any type of terrain as long as it is well watered and above all fertile. They can also be grown in common pots suitable for gardening. As far as the watering process is concerned, it is advisable to water the plant only and exclusively when the soil is completely dry and not to exceed in excess water, especially in winter and autumn, to ensure that the soil is always slightly moist. Instead for the fertilization of the Echium in the summer period it is enough to dissolve in the water some fertilizers suitable for the flowering of the plant, while in winter the slow release granular fertilizer.

Diseases and care

The most common parasite of Echium is the floury cochineal that usually lurks in the newly born leaves of the plant, but if the climate is humid it is infested by aphids which are essentially plant lice. Another disease found in this plant is the rot due to excess water, for this reason we must be careful at the time of watering.

Curiosity

The name echium derives from the Greek meaning viper this because the seeds of the echium are triangular in shape which resemble the head of the viper.