PlantFiles: Tower of Jewels, Pride of Tenerife, Tajinaste, Taginaste
Echium pininana

I saw this plant (or a variety of it?) in Montara, CA grow 30 feet or more. Does anyone know, are these Tower of Jewels or some other plant?

I agree that it (and other foreign plants) need not be planted in open, natural areas. There are enough invaders along the California Coast without adding more.

I have also seen Tower of Jewels as landscape plants in the Rancho Santa Fe area of San Diego County.

This is a gorgeous plant. We have one in our backyard that is 18 feet tall at this time although it has bloomed and is looking a little worse for the wear. We only water it occasionally.

Once established it needs next to no care which is great since, we sow seeds from this lovely plant all over Montara Mountain and Milagra Ridge near Pacifica hoping that this plant becomes firmly established here. So far it looks like we're winning over "nativists" that pull them with hundreds of new plants on the slopes over the last three years that we have been working on our project.

I can recommend this plant highly in the coastal areas of San Mateo, Santa Cruz and Marin counties. A magnificent centerpiece of a garden here Coastside.

I grew five plants from seed approx. two years ago and expect them to (hopefully) bloom this summer. They are planted in fairly poor soil on a hill, in partial sun. I have to water them often during dry months, sometimes twice a day during the hottest days of summer. I once came back from a summer vacation to find that the leaves were vertically hugging the stems as they had wilted from lack of water. As soon as they received a good drenching, they perked up and have never slowed in growth. The plants are a stunning centerpiece of my backyard hill (I submitted a photo, hopefully it was made available here) as well as a rare sight in San Diego. I highly recommend you try growing them from seed, especially if you live in So. Cal.

I 've sown E. pininana in februari indoors and planted the seedlings out in june 2004. We've had a cold and wet spring this year. Now (august) the seedlings have grown to nearly 80 cm (four feet)and the stalks are thick about 7 to 8 cm across.The seedlings are planted at a sheltered and usually dry spot where I hope they can endure our usually mild but wet winter.. I hope they'll survive because its growth looks very promissing and their bloom must be striking.. I wanted to see them grow myself because of the pics I've seen in PDB of it. Thanks to all of you!

This plant is invasive along the coast of northern California, and I recommend against using it in landscaping in that region. A single garden planting in Pacifica resulted in a population of hundreds of individuals of this species becoming established in a nearby national park, requiring many days of labor to remove.

The origin of these tall,architectural plants is the Canary Islands but two species Echium pininana and E. wildpretti are often labelled mistakenly by seedsmen.

The latter has a natural alpine habitat and is found in the high altitude craters in Tenerife where, although it seeds profusely, it is a protected plant known locally as "Taginaste". E. pininana has much lusher and larger leaves and although I have never seen it in its natural habitat, it is quite common in the milder South West gardens of Devon and Cornwall in the UK. It is a very striking plant with its huge flowering spike and it has been known to cross pollinate with E. wildpretti.