Salvia guaranitica

Salvia guaranitica is the blue that gardeners keep looking for and rarely find. From midsummer through to frost the plant sends up long spikes of tubular flowers in a deep, saturated blue, each one held in a calyx of darker purple-blue so the whole spike reads richer than the petals alone would manage. The leaves are heart-shaped, soft green, and release a clean anise scent when brushed, which is where the common name comes from. Hummingbirds find this sage and then keep the address. The species is a tender perennial or subshrub from a wide swathe of South America, native to Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and northern Argentina, and the epithet guaranitica honors the Guarani people of that region. Salvia is the great genus of the mint family, Lamiaceae, and the name comes from the Latin salvere, to heal or be well, for the medicinal reputation of common sage. That reputation belongs to Salvia officinalis and not to this one; blue anise sage is grown for the flowers and the scent, and we make no medicinal claim for the plant. Growth is upright and bushy on square dark green stems, three to four feet in a season and taller in a long one, and the plant tolerates the heat and humidity that flatten so many salvias, which makes this a genuinely good sage for Southern gardens. Blue anise sage takes full sun to part shade and is one of the few salvias that will flower respectably with some afternoon shade. Below the ground it runs on swollen tuberous roots, and one honest caution comes with the vigor: in mild climates and good soil the plant will spread from those tubers and fill more space than expected. Site accordingly, or lift and divide every few years. Place blue anise sage in a mixed border, a pollinator planting, or a large container, where the deep blue can sit against silver, chartreuse or hot orange rather than competing with other blues. Pair with agastache, salvias of other colors, warm-season grasses, and rudbeckia. Hardy through USDA zones 8 to 10, and worth trying in zone 7 in a sheltered, sharply drained spot under a deep winter mulch, where the plant dies to the ground and returns from the tubers in spring. Cut the old stems back in late winter, and treat the sage as a fast annual anywhere colder. Photo courtesy of BudOhio