Black Salvia

Spring is coming. I can see it, smell it, taste it. Grapes are on sale, and the February heat wave probably got the almond groves blooming. I pray it won't freeze now. I rush out to pick up just one particular plant, and come home with the car stuffed. No sooner do I start planting and repotting, then the heat goes away, I catch a cold, and I am left with the planting blues.

Not to worry. That's what my Internet plant list is for.  My first plant to buy this spring will be my long contemplated favorite sage, Salvia discolor.  You may know it as Peruvian Black Salvia, or Andean Silver Sage. This delicate love has silvery fuzz all over it's flower bracts, petioles, stems and undersides of leaves. The top of the leaf is bright shiny green.  The flowers are so dark purple, they look jet black. The natural color combo strikes me as elegant, spectral and clean. If this plant had a corresponding fairy, she would be the one that lives a little ways up the road from town, sociable, but solitary, you know, the one all the other fairies whisper about.  I am going to pamper the heck out of this thing.

Read more