A Blooming Miracle
“How can a man die when sage grows in his garden?”
If you accept the wisdom of this Latin proverb--and why shouldn’t you?--he can’t. According to early Romans and others through the ages, sage--or salvia, as it’s known botanically--cleans out the pipes, clears the head, whitens the teeth, bolsters the memory, battles colds, banishes baldness and counteracts snakebite. And that’s just the culinary kind. In addition to what you stuff in the bird on Thanksgiving (Salvia officinalis), there are more than 750 species of this plant, and learning them all is enough to prolong anybody’s life.
Native to such far-flung spots as Peruvian mountaintops and Mediterranean meadows, salvias, which belong to the mint family, come close to being model plants for Los Angeles gardens. Many can take punishing conditions and still bloom for months at a time. Sages grow as rangy groundcovers, middling shrubs or sky-high thickets, with flowers in delicate spires or fuzzy drifts of red, white, orange, yellow, blue, purple and almost-black. And their leaves smell like heaven.
At Carpinteria-based Chia Nursery, owner Robert Abe offers more than 50 salvia varieties, including the popular Mexican bush sage, throughout the year. Most resist pests and tolerate drought, and all but the largest have a winning subtlety that is almost shy. “They’re not flashy like a big, fat hydrangea or tub begonia,” Abe says. But what hydrangea has a leaf like Salvia semi-atrata’s--small and spade-shaped, dark green and raspy as a lizard’s back? What begonia can match the mystery of Andean silver-leaf sage, pale olive with a burnished underside and blooms the fathomless purple of a summer midnight?
Among Abe’s newest selections are S. chiapensis, a four-foot-tall, magenta-pink bloomer that flowers in shade as well as sun; S. glechomafolia, a groundcover with edible, sweet-tasting blue flowers; and S. madrensis, an 8- to 10-foot giant that fires up the winter garden with spires of yellow-gold. Other lusty winter bloomers include pineapple sage, with its canned-fruit-smelling foliage, pink-flowering S. karwinskii and the aptly named Christmas sage, which erupts in holiday red from now through January.
Most salvias bloom between spring and late fall, but some almost never stop. Of these, ‘Indigo Spires’ grows chin-high in rustling waves of cobalt spikes. You can snip some and take them indoors, though the best cutting sage, Abe says, is S. confertiflora, a tall, dark-orange beauty from Brazil.
Once you get past the dizzying array of choices, growing sage is almost as easy as taking a nap. Its major enemy is frost, though some varieties can handle cold. Don’t overfeed or overwater them, especially California natives, which like dry summers and reward you with the oil-rich perfumes of local chaparral. To prevent legginess, whack sage back after it blooms, sparing only a few inches near the ground. Some types--the lavender-like S. azurea grandiflora, the purple-leafed S. sinaloensis--die back on their own each winter. But as a rule, gardeners in our climate needn’t wait too long for sage.
“This is not a plant that asks for patience,” says Abe, who named his nursery after a native sage with edible seeds. “Plant sage from a little four-inch pot in spring; by fall, you can have a six-foot shrub.”
Needless to say, you won’t have to live forever to see it bloom.
