What the heck is this plant?

Q: Can you help me identify this tall herbaceous-looking columnar plant (pictured)?

A: It's an Echium pininana, a biennial that grows a stout stalk from a large rosette of silvery, hairy leaves. The following year it suddenly spurts into growth and produces a stout spear of a flower spike more than 12 feet high, wrapped with blue, funnel-shaped flowers.

After flowering, the plant dies, although sometimes it seeds itself if the following winter isn't too cold. Echiums are extremely drought-tolerant; they need perfect drainage to get through our wet winters. They're unfortunately tender; I lost mine in last winter's February Arctic blast, before it had grown beyond the rosette stage.

Q: A while back you wrote a column about Camellia sasanquas. I have one that used to bloom nicely on the north side of my Seattle house but we moved it to the south side because it was getting sort of leggy and floppy. It is growing reasonably well, but has yet to bloom in its new location, where it's been for about three years. Do you have any ideas?

A: Any plant can take a while to recover from transplanting, but your camellia should certainly be blooming again for you by now. My guess is that it is not setting buds because it's getting too dried out in the new, sunnier and warmer location.

While sasanqua camellias can be surprisingly drought-tolerant once they're well established, you should provide plenty of water during the first couple of summers after planting or transplanting, and always irrigate during the driest weeks of summer.

Also, while these camellias can take a light pruning, make sure you do any clipping after they flower and not in early autumn when the buds are developing, or you'll cut off the flowers for the coming fall and winter bloom.

Q: I planted some red flowering currants under a birch tree on the south side of my house. So far two plants, and the two I replaced them with, have died of what looks like some sort of fungus or mildew. The remaining one is somewhat affected but so far is pulling through.

I thought flowering currants were incredibly tough (they're planting them around all of the new libraries in Seattle). Do you have any idea what might be affecting them and whether it can be treated? It's a tough dry spot and I'm not sure what else to put there.

A: It doesn't matter what a plant is supposed to do, or what you might expect it to do, but how it actually performs in any given situation that counts, and it sounds to me like you have the right plant in the wrong place.

Ribes sanguineum, our native red flowering currant, is a tough and beautiful plant, but it still needs watering for the first few years and during summer drought. Like any native plant it needs to be sited where it will naturally thrive. Beneath a birch tree it is competing for moisture and nutrients with the tree, and it sounds like your currants have been out-competed.

To identify what disease is infecting your plants, take a damaged piece of the plant into any Master Gardener clinic (call 206-296-3440 for info on when and where to find a clinic in your neighborhood).

But if it were me, I'd face up to the fact that red flowering currants are never going to thrive in the environment in which you've planted them. Drought-tolerant groundcovers such as epimedium or wood spurge (Euphorbia amygdaloides var. robbiae) might be better choices for under your birch tree.

Valerie Easton also writes about Plant Life in Sunday's Pacific Northwest Magazine. Write to her at P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111 or e-mail planttalk@seattletimes.com with your questions. Sorry, no personal replies.