Looking for echium seeds (viper's bugloss) in Canada. This is a short perennial which blooms continuously for several months, very bee friendly. Have only found them in Ireland and England.
I have seen echium in several gardens here in the Kootenays. You can buy seeds from Thompson & Morgan annual or biennial. I am sure other seed companies sell them too.
They are only listed in the English catalogue, not the Canadian one. I have checked several other Canadian suppliers with no luck. Thanks for your help.
Yes, I overlooked the fact that the listing was for the UK. Sorry for my uninformed answer and thanks for your appreciation anyhow and pointing this out to me. We can always learn from out mistakes, though. Because of my mistake I have learned that viper's bugloss (echium vulgare) is a noxious weed here in BC. The weed is a major concern in your region (Thompson). http://www.bcinvasives.ca/publications/TIPS/Blueweed_TIPS.pdf. It is why you were not able to find it in Canadian catalogues. If you still want to grow it, it should not be difficult to obtain seeds by gathering them from the wild. On the other hand, there are beautiful, cultivated varieties of echium being grown around here, so it must be possible to buy the seeds of those. Here is a picture of a cultivated variety of echium in one of the gardens in my area.
Yes, I would try to find something more suitable than this invasive. To see the effects of it, travel to the community of Lower Nicola and look along the roadsides of Bailey Ave / Aberdeen Rd -- it covers the roadsides (see second photo in this BPotD entry)
My vipers bugloss got crowded out by my canadian columbine. I keep reading that it's considered invasive, and it managed to come back 2 or 3 years... before I lost it... Down here in GA, it was a biennial... I never had more than about 3 or 4 plants a year... Definitely not invasive. I'm gonna try moving my columbines out after they bloom, and see if I can get any bugloss seeds in the seed bank to come up.
