Treated as annuals means the plant cannot survive the winter outdoors.

All the salvias you mentioned are perennial, except maybe S. coccinea but I have had one survive the winter but it was right up against the foundation of the house on a south facing wall.

S.coccinea, roemeriana and splendens should flower the first year, sow the seeds early as in Jan.- Feb.
S. roemeriana works well in a container.

SG

Hi salviaguy. Thanks for your reply.

All the plants I mentioned above are perennial including S. coccinea, but none of them are hardy. ie none of them can be guaranteed to survive the winter here without protection, which puts them all in the same category. So I have been a bit perplexed as to why I should treat some as annuals, ie grow fresh from seed and treat others as perennial by protecting them over winter.

However after thinking about it, I think the answer must be that some, such as S. coccinea and S. splendens grow to virtually full size and flower well in their first year, so you can afford to grow fresh each year and thus avoid the problem of overwintering them. Whilst I presume the others don't flower well in their first year, so it is worth the effort of overwintering them to get the benefit of a more mature plant in the second year.

I have just had a look at your list of Salvias - thats awesome! A lot of those I don't know, but I would imagine that many if not most are not hardy in your zone 8. How do you keep them overwinter?

Peter,

That list is an old list. I have many other ones that I haven't added to that list.

I keep them alive by puting them in my hoophouse. I heat it when the temperature goes down into the 20'sF. This usually occurs at night.

I also keep some of my larger species which I grow in large containers so I can have large plants for propagation and for the garden.

Some of these are;
S. involucrata
S. recurva
S. curtiflora
S. iodantha
S. 'Anthony Parker'
S. rubescens

These also bloom in the late winter or early spring.

SG

Pterls,
You're right on the money - some salvias grow fast enough from seed and bloom long enough to be used as annuals. Others are a bit slower, or flower for a shorter time, so they don't make a good choice for an annual flower bed where flowers all summer long are expected. However, many of the salvias that are usually treated as perennials do grow very fast. If you can start by April you can have large plants by fall of many species such as S. madrensis, S. mexicana, S. iodantha, S. involucrata, S. puberula, S. elegans, S. leucantha, and others. These plants will flower in their first fall. However, if your climate is like mine, with killing frost in October or November, you will miss the main flowering period for many of these plants and so they just aren't popular garden plants in our climate. For all of the list above I am familiar only with growing from cuttings. I have never grown most of these salvias from seed. If I was going to try and grow these year after year I would overwinter cuttings, place them in the garden as soon as the danger of frost has passed, and grow them in the ground until fall, when I would again take cuttings.