A couple of late salvias

I seem to meet a new (to me) salvia everywhere I go these days, and collecting them via cuttings in summer seems absurdly easy. I showed one favourite, the yellow S. madrensis, two weeks ago. The plants I was growing outside perished with the first serious frost; the one I potted up for the conservatory is still a picture. The same with S. bethellii (which had been flowering in the garden since June). Many of the tender Central and South American ones, though, seem to need all summer to get started. Their great moment here is early November, potted up and safe under glass.

Here are two: the well known S. vanhouttei and one whose name I need to find, but which for the moment I call by the name of the garden that supplied the cutting in March: Vergelegen near Cape Town.

S. vanhouttei contrives to be both brilliant orange-red and shaded or bloomed on the upper side of the petals with a purple sheen that my photograph, I fear, has difficulty in showing. S. “?Vergelegen” is a soft bright purple, more red in tint than S. guaranitica, with six-inch flowerheads on a vigorous bush. The parent plant was ten feet each way; mine in the conservatory is over five feet high and across in four months.

Neither plant has much merit apart from its flowers. The leaves are small, softly hairy, mid green and mint-scented on S. “?Vergelegen”, paler and longer on C. vanhouttei.

I commend them both to the house.

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