Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blue’

9 November 2009

Salvias have flowered later than ever this year here (perhaps because of our very dry summer), but November, before any frost outdoors and even more in the conservatory, sees them as a main attraction.

I am pretty sure this Salvia guaranitica is the variety called ‘Black and Blue’, though I received it some 30 years ago from Michael Hickson at Knightshayes in Devon with no name, beyond the species, proffered. It grew in the Knightshayes conservatory to a prodigious height and was trained along the ceiling – something I have tried to do, but never succeeded. Nine feet seems to be its limit in a 12 inch pot here. It will flower on, though at temperatures in the low 40s, for most of the winter.

Americans call this the Blue Anise Sage on the pretext that its leaves have that sort of smell. They are sweetly, but not to me anisely, scented. My photograph is, of course, too true-blue to be true. Deep violet is the real colour, the calyx a sort of green-tinted indigo (rather than black). The flowers are an inch and a half long, with the sort of eager gaping mouth that always reminds me of Kermit the Frog.

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