Your Mendocino County Garden: August

MENDOCINO CO., 8/10/26 — Nobody on this coast plants an echium, commonly called Pride of Madeira, twice. You don’t have to. You put one in, you admire it, and the following spring there are three more coming up in the gravel where you never asked for them, all of them looking pleased with themselves.

And then June arrives and it does the thing that buys it another year. Those blue spikes go up like something out of a fairy tale, the bees lose their minds, and every visitor who has never seen one stops the car. I have been talking myself out of pulling echiums for a long time on the strength of about three weeks in June.