Echiums By Geoffrey Boot  You may have seen this plant that grew in the car park this year; it certainly attracted a lot of attention from people in the pub so I couldn’t help but write about it.  No this is not some foreign swear word, they are phallic‑like flowering plants that grow up to 20 feet tall. This year we are host to a magnificent specimen that, through careful nurturing, has become a prominent feature in the Castle car park.  Suzie and I discovered echiums many years ago. We were fascinated by their strange, almost surreal appearance in the Abbey gardens at Tresco, in fact all over the Scilly Isles where they seem to grow like weeds and throughout the Channel Islands. So much so that when we were staying on Alderney in what one might term a farm (I am not quite sure that 2 acres puts it within that definition, although we were told that they used to milk cows and now they milk the tourists!) they were bewailing the fact that they had to weed the things out.  The Castle being on the seafront offered a micro‑climate and seemed the ideal location to grow some of these fascinating plants. Over the years we collected seeds from the Channel Islands, dug up small plants, we even found some growing in the Canary Isles.  Our best find seemed to be a little family of plants growing in Southern Ireland, a fairly robust location which we thought might emulate the Castle climate. We learnt a lot about the life cycle and the gestation of the seeds, which grow to 18 inches in their first year and, at the beginning of their second year if they survive the ravages of Winter as they seem particularly prone to frost, burst forth and by the end of May can be as high as 20 feet and in full bloom.  Along the way all manner of beasties seem to attack them. Vine weevils eat their roots and this year we discovered a particularly malevolent caterpillar in the foliage of our four specimens that had survived the winter. They did for one completely and ate the top out of two.  The derris dust deterred them and they allowed our car park specimen to survive.  So despite years of cultivation this is the first one which has survived to maturity and, better still, depending on when you read this, if you’re passing the Castle car park you now know what that strange flowering plant is. It’s an echium!  Article published in the Winter 07 Sandgate News