If you’ve never seen it before, fasciation is quite interesting. Here is a seedling echium, possibly an echium pinniniana cultivar that has for some reason decided to mutate its normally single stem into a sort of spatula of siamesed proto-stems. With its prodigious vigour now diverted into furnishing all of these proto-stems with the required number of leaves, the poor unfortunate echium has no strength left to produce flowers or grow to its normal height.

 

 

 

The result is, to me at any rate, captivating. Even looking at the photos again I half expect the face of a ‘green man ‘ to emerge out of the whiskery leaves and adjust his centre parting.