Echinops
Echinops spp.
Special Features
Prized for their unique spiky flower heads, often used in flower arrangements or dried flower displays. Distinctive appearance makes them a standout addition to garden landscapes and floral arrangements.
Plant Specifications
Our team will help you integrate this plant into your landscape design
Growing Echinops on Martha's Vineyard
Echinops ritro, the globe thistle, is an architectural perennial that brings structural drama and a distinctive silver-gray palette to the hot, dry, infertile sandy conditions of Martha's Vineyard's most sun-exposed coastal borders and meadow garden programs. Its steely blue spherical flower heads on tall silver-gray stems provide a striking geometric element in the mixed perennial border of properties in Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, and the dried seedheads retain their structural appeal into winter, extending the plant's ornamental contribution well beyond the summer bloom season.
Prickly foliage and stems provide reliable deer resistance throughout the island. Estate Care professionals cut plants back to basal foliage after the primary flowering flush to encourage a second cycle of bloom, stake in particularly wind-prone coastal positions where tall stems are vulnerable to lodging, and divide large clumps every four to five years to prevent center dieback.
