The Bluest Flower: Salvia patens SOLD OUT

In September of 2018, I fell back in love with a plant I had grown way back in the early 1990's, when there were a couple of great greenhouses still operating in my area and more cool plants were available. Salvia patens, or Gentian Sage, or Salvia "Blue Angel"...call it what you will; this plant has The Blue of All Blues in the largest Salvia flowers I know of. Gentian blue, delphinium blue, royal, true BLUE.

Native to Mexico, its species name, patens, means "spreading." And it does spread, sending up multiple stalks on a semi-prostrate central stem, to form a delicious mound. 

It blooms more or less continuously throughout late summer, right up to frost. 

Hazelhurst's Salvia patens plants, 09/2018

Here I was in a garden at an estate called Hazelhurst north of Wausau, Wisconsin in late September 2018, beholding this treasured plant once again. My heart beating almost out of my chest, I peeked into the leafy calyx of a spent blossom. And there beheld four seeds! Carefully, I extracted them, then two more, and folded them into a bit of paper in my pocket to carry home.

Being excited, I planted them too early that winter, and I got one plant in my greenhouse that lived through in a spindly way until the spring. I set it out and it made some seeds in the fall of 2019. I've been collecting seeds and growing Salvia patens since then. For the last three winters, I've made sure to dig up some plants to bring into the greenhouse, to overwinter on its cold, but not freezing, floor. Here's a winter rosette that came up from some roots I dug. It'll just perk along like this all winter until it warms up enough to be planted out. I'm so glad I saved a rootball over; that'll jumpstart my flowers come spring. Note that it is on the floor of the greenhouse, which keeps it from trying to grow very much. I need to keep it semi-dormant until closer to the time I can plant it out (mid-May). 

I'm hooked on that blue. Overwintered roots; seeds; I want all the insurance I can get, that I'll have this plant in my garden from here on out. AND--they are highly deer-resistant! Yep, one more reason to love them. The four maurauding deer who have invaded my gardens actually ate around them last fall! The foliage is strongly scented, being in the mint family, and both hairy and sticky, and those three things tend to deter deer from eating them.

I suspect their primary pollinator is bumblebees, though there were always hummingbirds hanging around that bed, too.

Last summer of 2022, I got serious about collecting seeds from my plants.  The plants didn't even begin to set seed until September. I suspect they tired of me poking around in their ovaries, but it was hard to wait until they were ripe! Here's a split calyx with four ripening seeds inside. They're big, like the flowers.

Ripe seeds turn black. Notice the size of that flower! Just huge.

Generally, you'll get two seeds per fertilized flower. Four if you're really lucky.

Gentian sage is the definition of precious and rare, at least to me. I so enjoyed harvesting the seeds, checking every day to see which ones had ripened.

I planted some seeds on January 13, and they started coming up about 7-10 days later. They have two large heart-shaped cotyledons. Between those two hearts springs a little plant with opposite leaves. I should have nice little plants to set out by mid-May. 

These are three-week-old plants. They're very satisfying to plant and grow from seed.

You really don't need a greenhouse. They'll sprout from seed on a sunny windowsill. When it warms up real good and they're big and strong, plant them out in sun or part shade and keep them moist until they're well-established. I'm sure they'd grow in containers as well. The mature plant should be about 2' high by 2-3' across by September, so space accordingly! It lives over the winter in zone 8-10, but should be treated as an annual (whose roots you can overwinter in the pot in a bright cool spot) anywhere else.

I love this plant so much I want to share it. BUT I AM SOLD OUT as of 7:40 pm Feb. 20 2023.  I am offering a set of six seeds for $20. Which includes shipping. This is steep, I know, but they're rare; I am not a professional producer, and these plants are durn stingy with their seeds! I'll gather more this coming fall if there seems to be demand for them. I don't know about you, but I NEED these huge lippy blue flowers in my garden. 

If you'd like to buy a packet, please go to paypal.me/JulieZickefoose  and make your payment of $20 via the PayPal link there. 

Where it says "Add a Message," please provide your mailing address!

If you don't give me your address I can't send the seeds.

If you run into problems, please email me at juliezickefooseATgmailDOTcom and provide your mailing address.   I'll send the seeds by US mail. 

I'm sorry, I won't be accepting checks by mail for this offer; I suspect they're going to go too fast.

Again, you must provide me your MAILING ADDRESS in the "Add a Message" section on Paypal.

 I can't send you the seeds without that. If you miss the "Add a Message" notice on Paypal as you make your payment, email me at juliezickefooseATgmailDOTcom with your address, and you'll get your seeds.

When they're gone,  and I suspect they will go fast, I'll immediately update the blogpost to indicate that and put a note in the comments.  SOLD OUT Evening Feb. 20. And I'll grow more this summer. :) Those wee seedlings have some work to do!

 I'll put the proceeds toward the glass lean-to greenhouse I've been dreaming about for, well, all my life. :)

The Groanhouse has had a ten-year run, and it's served me well, but it is disintegrating.

Time to think bigger and much, much better. 

 

I'm still trying to wrangle people to come together to dig footers, pour a new pad, build the foundation, and assemble the glass, which will be delivered in a kit from Botanical Greenhouse Builders LLC, out of Rocky River, Ohio. The goal is to have a real greenhouse by frost time (Halloween) 2023.  Being my own general contractor for this project been a big learning experience, and I won't lie, it's been very frustrating to try to line up so many different crafstpeople, but I am nothing if not determined.  I am still trying to get this thing pulled together and rolling, after two months of steady pressure. 

If, being optimistic, I've got twenty more years to live in this wonderful house, I want to walk out of my bedroom and into a real greenhouse, one that's insulated and sturdy and won't need to be held together with ten rolls of Gorilla Tape, applied each fall. This, I have earned. 

 

Art and Love in Wisconsin

 Displaying two perfect, squeaky squidgy Wisconsin cheese curds. From left, Master Artists Robert Bateman, Cindy House, and Not-Master Artist me.

 

The center of art in Wisconsin: Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, with a fabulous crane installation called "The Dance" by Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein.

 

What a sculpture garden this museum has! 

It's not at all like me to blog something so current, but I'm stuck for 7 hours in Detroit's airport, just trying to get home on a dreary gray day, victim of a malfunctioning emergency aisle light on a plane, that had to be fixed before it would be cleared for takeoff. That little burned out light meant I missed my connection in Detroit, and the next plane going to Akron doesn't leave Detroit until 10  tonight. That gets me in at Indigo Hill at approximately 1:30 AM, after I drive the two hours home in blinding rain. Yay. First world problems. I have a car, I have a home to go to, right? Still, it is a bit of a bummer to be so tired and not be able to get home in a remotely timely way.

Reflecting on the great time I had while in the care of Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum's wonderful staff seems a good way to feel thankful while sitting in a corner on my enforced staycation. Cindy House, fabulous pastel artist and dear friend, asked me to introduce her at two functions during the Birds in Art show at which she received the Master Artist medal. I got to hang it around her neck!!  I also wrote a long article for the show catalogue, in which I attempted to say enlightened things about the importance of her glorious art. Better than that was getting to tell a lot of other artists and art appreciators how much Cindy means to me personally. I really loved getting to do that.

 

One thing I wanted everyone to know was how funny Cindy is, something that doesn't come through in her majestic pastels at all. My intro turned out well, because Cindy's talk immediately after my little speech was cripplingly funny. Here, she's describing being on enormous Antarctic seas in a hurricane, and saying, "You know you're in trouble when the maid puts a seatbelt on your bed..."

The talent packed into this wee person is inestimable. Go to her website and look at her pastels. This is one of my favorites. You can see through the waves way down into the water.

We had no trouble at all with PDA's. That's how we roll.

It was such a delight to be among friends and fellow bird artists. I got to see Elwin Van der Kolk, with his gorgeous miniature of shelducks on a mudflat.

 

Such a simple concept, but so, so beautifully realized.  His website: for more of Elwin's incredible work click here.

I've no idea how it came up, but somehow Elwin and I discovered that we had both contributed art to the cover of two different editions of Vernon Head's wonderful book, The Rarest Bird in the World: The Search for the Nechisar Nightjar. Elwin did the cover of the Dutch language edition:

 

and my painting was used for the cover of the English language paperback edition:

 

The bird is known only from one dried wing from a roadkill, which is why our paintings have a certain similarity.

More beauty--John Pitcher's breathtaking nesting parasitic jaeger.  Holy wow.

 

Irish artist Julian Friers' incredible northern fulmar painting. He's a barrel of monkeys--plays guitar and pennywhistle; paints portraits of rock stars, extinct animals and other awesome things. His website is here.

 

I gloried in a huge auxiliary exhibit of Master Artist Anne Senechal Faust's serigraphs. Oh My Gosh. 

It was such a privilege to be here among such gifted people. Utterly humbling. 

 

Speaking of soul-feeding... I got to spend some incredible quality time with the wildly talented Debby Kaspari. We made music together, yakked, talked art and life, and soaked each other in. Oh my heart.

The artists all had to stand by their paintings in the Birds in Art show, which left me orbiting rather aimlessly, and wanting to get out into the warm September sunshine. There's no way you can put out enough cheese and crackers for several thousand people, so I got really hungry at the cheeseless Saturday morning public opening.  I decided to go foraging. I only walked about five blocks before I lucked out and found some wild plums dropping their fruit with abandon along a driveway in Wausau. 

 I gobbled about a dozen of them, and wish I'd taken more.

Saturday afternoon is given over to a trip to Hazelhurst, the private estate of the Woodson family which so graciously hosts Birds in Art. There are ravishing gardens which looked fabulous, even in September.  Glorious tall Japanese anemones blew me away.

 

 

 Morning glories were just starting to bloom, and already closed for the day. Mine in Ohio are only thinking about making buds. It is ever thus.

  

 I was delighted to find a new bee for me: Tri-colored or Orange-belted Bumblebee, Bombus ternarius. It's on Sedum "Autumn Joy."

 

They're zippy little bees, tolerant but fast. 

I found a Grail--a plant I've grown but once and then lost touch with. This is Salvia patens, Gentian Sage, so called because the only flower that comes close to its jaw-dropping pure royal blue would be bottle gentian. I have to say that this salvia beats even gentian for a true blue. It's bluer than almost any delphinium I've seen. Not a hint of lavender. BLUE. blue blue electric blue. Nothing like it.  Not that I'm hung up on blue or anything.

 

Debby Kaspari, a fellow plant freak and awesome gardener, caught me massaging Salvia seedpods until I found some fat brown ripe seeds. Eureka!

 

I would imagine you know what will happen to those. It's gonna take about a year, but expect to see this plant in my garden in 2019. Garden goals!

 

Debby and I were taken on a deluxe two-person sunset pontoon boat cruise around the lake, during which we ogled a young common loon, three hooded mergansers, a bald eagle and about ten billion whirligig beetles. I fell asleep with the sun on my cheek.  I dreamt I was in a Cindy House painting.  And that is a beautiful dream indeed.

Thank you, Kathy Foley and the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum staff, for having me up to honor one of my dearest friends. It was a trip I'll never forget. 

Thank you my dear dear friends for all the love. I'm going to try and store it up for awhile. 

 

A badly-lit goodbye clench at the hotel last night. I had soul-feeding conversations with (from left) Amy Montague, Larry Barth, Cindy House, Barry (and Lisa, far left!) Van Dusen and Eric Derleth, and I'm much the better for it. Gosh I love these people. I feel so lucky to call them friends. Shoutout to my beloved James Coe who was yakkin' elsewhere when this shot was taken.

 

Now to walk .6 miles in search of dinner. DTW Terminal A, here I come.