Plants I'm growing: First Blooms--Echium Boissieri (2009)

First blooms today on some of the many Echium boissieri plants in the garden, all of which are volunteers from seeds from a single plant I put in three or four years ago. Like many of the Echiums, this is a biennial, forming a flat rosette of leaves in the first year and then throwing up a giant spike of flowers in the second year, before dying. The original plant came from Annie's Annuals (in Richmond, California) via Cottage Gardens, in Petaluma, California, but neither source has had this species for several years now, as far as I can tell.