Welcome to the Gardner's World magazine Sewalong series, the podcast that inspires you to grow more from seed.

Hello. Hello, this is Alan Titchmarsh talking today about ekems, those glorious, tall, blue, white or sometimes even pink spires, that you see often in gardens by the sea and in the milder counties of Britain,

we do have a native ekem, Echium vulgari, the Vipers bugloss.

You can see that growing wild in the countryside, but those of us who have gardens envy these enormous great,

ten or twelve foot spires of glorious flowers that are wonderful at attracting bees.

Now there is one great hazard to these tall ekeums and their varieties of ekeum pininana,

and that is that they're not fully hardy, which poses problems for inland gardens and certainly gardens in colder areas,

but you can grow them in pots. It's tricky and they'll need a big pot and you'll need to bring them inside in winter because the problem with them is that they're not frost hardy.

I grow them outdoors in my garden on the Isle of Wight, right next to the Solent.

Milder counties in the south and west and perhaps even in central London, there too you can

get them through the winter.

But as soon as a bit of a frost comes, they perish.

There are ways round this.

Let's talk about raising them from seed.

They are incredibly easy.

Outdoors, they seed themselves,

and you'll find a rash of seedlings coming up under a mature plant.

The plants themselves, if we're talking about pininana,

which is the main variety that I think most people love this tall, stately, spectacular spire.

They are monocarpic. Now, what that means is that they die after flowering. They flower once

and then perish. The thing about them is they take usually at least two years and probably three,

sometimes even four, to get to flowering size. But when they do, boy, are they spectacular.

...