Well sages two through four are from the Mohave Desert and require arid, limy conditions and therefore hard to grow.

Check the Las Pilitas Nursery site for horticultural details.

Here is a link that might be useful: Las Pilitas Nursery

For Rich the conditions some of these plants require might be a detriment but for us here in Las Vegas these sages sound great!

Of these I only have Salvia Pachyphylla but I just love that plant. It never looks anything but good and I just love that California Chaparal kind of look. It is pictured here blooming in front of another great but not rare CA sage, S. clevlandii.

I did not grow the pachyphylla from seed but from a very small plant. We are in Las Vegas so we have alkaline soil, clay but amended at planting time with gravel and horse manure. It is on a drip line and gets watered when the top couple of inches are dry, not on a set schedule although probably able to do without supplemental water in Ca.

I would love to be able to find the sages you mentioned but nothing would be available locally and I tried mail order once with Las Pilitas and it wasn't a good experience. Too bad they aren't closer, the one time I visited thier Escondido location it was quite out of the way.

By all means do share where you get your seed from, Maria

Your pachyphylla has me drooling.

Also drooling in the UK! I had pachyphylla for 5 years, and never saw one flower! Climate here totally wrong!
Robin.

I am also drooling in Australia, Great photo of a beautiful salvia.

I have seen seed listed off some of those at Alplains and Southwestern Native seeds.

Annette

Thanks Mohavemaria, that's exactly the kind of experience I was looking for. I really have to get that pachyphylla for my yard - that is an outstanding picture. I checked Las Palitas and they havent had any of those sages on my list this season, but their cultural information was helpful.

I am surprised that with the rise in interest native and xeric plants that these sages are so hard to find. I went through the CA native plant (CNPLX) website, Theodore Payne, Cabrillo, the CA native plant society, San Marcos Growers, Native Sons, Tree of Life, the CalFlora database, California Gardens and others and found only one of these - the munzii - available for purchase. Growing from seed honestly seems like my best option, as tough as it may be.

I'm not saying there aren't great native and/or xeric sages in nurseries here - I jusy got a beautiful africana-lutea and leucophylla and have ordered a brandegeei and a dorii dorii - but I wonder about these other species absence and if we in the West need another 5 new types of greggi or guaranitica or microphylla annually.

Thanks - Marc

I thought that this was a Salvia forum.....not a drooling forum!!!

But, pachyphylla does make us drool over here! As does the stinking S. mohavensis....gorgeous flowers, which I have only seen in photos! All the Californian natives are marvellous, but very difficult in England. Clevelandii grows well, but hardly ever flowers. But S. munzii seems to adapt well, and flowers for a long period, beautiful!

What else make you drool? Dombeyi, oxyphora, buchananii, brevilabra, gravida, and a hundred others?

Robin.

Good thing I put my bib on before viewing that pic, Maria! That is one of the loveliest Salvias I've ever seen. And both of them together is like Captain & Tennille all over again. :D

"...if we in the West need another 5 new types of greggi or guaranitica or microphylla annually."

Amen to THAT! I want more native selections! Where do I sign?

Brenda

Well, I can add to everyone's excitement by noting that Salvia bucharica, found in Afghanistan and to the north and west, is the old world equivalent, with rose bracts and blue tubular flowers. It is in the section Schraderia, which includes a lovely Turkish species (S. hydrangea). These were once considered a separate genus.

The equally elusive S. cadmica (yellow flowers) from Greece and Turkey also has large bracts. This is sometimes sold as Greek mountain tea.

Searching this info has caused at least a momentary lusting for Turkish and Iranian sages, the second greatest area of Salvia development after Mexico. Alas, I have to leave these to arid area gardens like the Denver botanical Garden, which has done the best job of keeping Jim & Jenny Archibald's collections alive. Many of the collection areas are now too near Iraq and the Kurdish areas of Turkey.

Dr. Ian Hedge of RBG Edinburgh told me of an unhappy incident with a Turkish army patrol which they came across by accident. This resulted in having the many exposed rolls of film of Salvias confiscated. Good luck finding anyone willing and able to collect in Iran, either.

Thanks for all the kind comments about our pachyphylla. England, North Carolina and even most of australia seem like much more plant friendly places than Las Vegas but a few things do like it here. I won't even try most of the salvias talked about on this site because I know they are just a future dead plant here.

Marc, you mentioned wanting to get a dorii and the pic is of one - I think. An hours drive from Las Vegas is Mt. Charleston in the Spring mountains and we hike up there when it is too hot here. This is a plant we have found there that I think is S. Dorii dorii but I'm not sure. Maybe someone else will refute this.

Tried growing a couple this year but made the big mistake of putting them in the West facing backyard. It is brutal back there and only the masochistic plants survive that furnace. They were troopers for a good part of the summer before they gave up. Next year they go in the east facing front.

Some other ones we have and love are S. chamaedryoides, penstemonoides, greggii "wild thing", and the everyone has one farinacea.

Maria

Mohavemaria, you've done it again. Robin and I will drool some more, and so will my friends on the Alpine-L and Medit(erranean) discussion groups. A high-res image of this with closeups could even qualify for Rickett's Wildflowers of the United States, lomg out of print and still mind-blowing for me. That reference convinced me that I wanted to do a lot of flower touring out west. I first got an idea of what western Agastaches and Salvias could do from those volumes.

In one of my weaker moments I ordered a pachyphylla from High Country Gardens and added it to a xeric planting I was doing this spring. Surprisingly it has done well so far, probably because it has hardly rained since April. It is about a foot tall and wide and just maybe will flower next. Yes I know, 'fat chance'.

Maybe not. In appropriate years, I've had clevelandii bloom for me. Pray for an extended autumn without too many soakers.

I'm conflicted on this in North Carolina, where the 100 degree heat has broken and we are looking to more normal 85+ highs for the next few weeks. We need rain badly yet, so no xeric plants for me.

You can order dorii from High Country Gardens.

I was just curious about how pachyphylla would grow in super well drained sand. As a new plant it actually suffered from the lack of water this summer and looked likely to croak. It was the one new sage that I wasn't able to propagate from cuttings this spring. Maybe they are better tried during the heat of summer?

I agree with you about drought, I want none of it.

The California sages need robust green wood for cuttings, especially when they grow fast in the spring. Even then, they are slow to root.

So I sent an email to San Marcos Growers and El Nativo and their response was basically "good luck".

Its not like there are 500 types of CA sages - in my understanding, there are only 17 native salvias to the whole state. About half of them seem readily available at nurseries or by order. It seems like there should be a retail market for all of these - the fastest growing part of CA is into the desert regions like Palmdale and there are plenty of homeowners in Utah, Nevada and Arizona who need low-water plants (we just went into water restrictions this week in L.A.because of the drought).

Other than named varieties and crosses, are there any other CA natives than these?
Salvia apiana
Salvia brandegeei
Salvia carduacea
Salvia clevelandii
Salvia columbariae
Salvia dorrii
Salvia eremostachya
Salvia funerea
Salvia greatae Brandegee
Salvia leucophylla
Salvia mellifera
Salvia mohavensis
Salvia munzii
Salvia pachyphylla
Salvia sonomensis
Salvia spathacea
Salvia vaseyi
Salvia verbenacea