I love salvia

No really, I do. There's Salvia spathacea (Hummingbird sage), S. clevelandii (Cleveland sage), S. melliferra (Black sage), S. apiana (White sage), S. leucophylla (Purple sage) and those are just the California natives. There's also Pineapple sage (S. elegans) with numerous beautiful, elegant red flowers and leaves that smell just like, you guessed it, pineapples! Oh, when you read the title of this entry, you thought I was talking about that other salvia, the recreational drug (or whatever it is). Uh, no.

So, anyway, the salvias I mentioned all have mild to very fragrant leaves and the natives, at least, require little or no supplemental water. The spathacea spreads through rhizomes and over time makes a nice groundcover; the others are shrubs although the melliferra comes in prostrate forms that can spread pretty wide too.

Which reminds me of when I took a computer class several years ago. The atmosphere was casual (part of the class was learning web design - creative types, right?), so one day I decided to bring in some of the leaves from my garden to share with a few classmates that sat near me. There were samples from my different salvia plants, a small stem of my California sagebrush, a leaf from the coyote mint plant... that's mostly it. I love their various scents and even thought of a name for that day's activity: Show and Smell.