Viper’s Bugloss, Echium vulgare, in the Norfolk Brecks.

I love Viper’s Bugloss, Echium vulgare. It’s a plant that always makes me smile, because of its lovely flowers and because it brings back happy childhood memories. The first time I saw it was as a child of four or five at Newborough Warren on Anglesey, on holiday to visit my Welsh grandmother. It is a plant that normally teems with life and it is always worth checking the flowers for bees and butterflies.

At the end of June we walked from Santon to Brandon in the Brecks (see Note). It was very, very dry and vegetation was crispy underfoot. Ragwort (Senecio jacobaea), Wild Mignonette (Reseda lutea) and Viper’s Bugloss were nearly the only plants in flower. Viper’s Bugloss was proving the most popular plant for insects and almost every flower spike was being visited by bumblebees and Small Skipper butterflies. There were often half a dozen butterflies per plant.

Newborough Warren and Breckland have one thing in common – well drained, sandy soil. In addition, Breckland also has very low rainfall. Viper’s Bugloss, Echium vulgare, is well adapted to these conditions because it has a long tap root that reaches deep into the ground for water.

Echium vulgare is an erect, bristly plant which grows up to 75cm (about 30 inches) tall at maturity. It is a biennial, although it may take three rather than two years to flower. It will normally die after flowering. In its first year or two it forms a basal rosette of hairy, lance-shaped leaves. In its final year it produces dense cylindrical spikes of flowers, usually a main spike surrounded by several smaller ones. The flowers are violet-blue and bell-shaped and continue from early June throughout July and into August.

Echium vulgare is a member of the Borage family, Boraginaceae, and a relative of Green Alkanet, Pentaglottis sempervirens, which I wrote about in April 2017. The Online Atlas of the British and Irish Flora lists the following places where it can be found: bare places on chalk and limestone downs, on heaths, in quarries and chalk-pits, in cultivated and waste land, along railways and roadsides, and by the coast on cliffs, sand dunes and shingle. The plant is native to most of Europe and temperate Asia but it has been introduced into the United States, where it is listed in the Invasive Plant Atlas. It is especially invasive in Montana, Washington and Wyoming and Montana State University has published an online pamphlet describing its biology. As it needs bare soil for the seeds to germinate, its presence can be a symptom of overgrazing.

In the UK, Viper’s Bugloss is a great plant for wildlife and will grow well in gardens if it is sunny and there is bare soil and there are named cultivars such as ‘Blue Bedder‘. Our garden has the right kind of soil but the garden faces north, so although Viper’s Bugloss does well in summer, it can die off if it is in an area of the garden that is in deep shade during winter. On our allotment Viper’s Bugloss does better, as the soil is the same but it is sunny all year round.

The name Viper’s Bugloss (sometimes given a hyphen, Viper’s-bugloss) comes from the plant’s snaky appearance. The flowers’ long red stamens look a bit like snakes’ tongues and the fruits are said to resemble adders’ heads.The stem is speckled, which is suggestive of snake skin. In the United States the plant is often known as Blueweed. A close relative, Echium plantagineum, Purple Viper’s Bugloss, sometimes occurs as an arable weed in the British Isles. It is known in Australia as Paterson’s Curse, having allegedly been introduced in the 1880s by a Jane Paterson as a garden flower. It is now a serious problem in many pastures.

Both Echium vulgare and Echium plantagineum contain toxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which can cause liver damage. There are no reports of human poisoning but horses and sheep are at risk and following bushfires in the Canberra area of Australia in 2003, forty horses were put down after eating too much Echium plantagineum. If you’re in the UK, don’t let this put you off growing Viper’s Bugloss. I bought my seeds from Emorsgate Seeds, though there is so much of the plant in some places that I’m sure it would be OK to collect some from the wild.

The bee to the right of the flower is Anthophora bimaculata, the Green-eyed or Little Flower Bee. In Norfolk it is found in the Brecks. When we visited in late June, males (with their characteristic green eyes and mosquito-like high pitched buzz) were patrolling the Viper’s Bugloss flower spikes, on the hunt for females.

Note: Although Brandon is in Suffolk, we stayed on the Norfolk side of the river throughout, and Brandon station is in Norfolk, so we didn’t need our passports.