In Celebration of Salvias – King of Deer Proof Plants

With over 1000 varieties, Salvia is a huge genus in the mint family, and comes in a dizzying variety of colors, sizes, and hardiness. Annual, perennial, temp perennial, or small shrubs, most of the varieties have stunning and colorful flowers paired with fragrant foliage. Tolerating a wide variety of soils and conditions, Salvias need minimal water to thrive. A garden designer for 30 years, I rely on this family again and again for my perennial border designs. Pairing Salvias with Nepetas or Catmint is a deer-proof powerhouse. See my article on Nepetas for a rundown of this extremely useful deer resistant plant.

In early to mid-May, I celebrate when my early blooming Salvias come into bloom, announcing the transition from spring to summer.  Adding pizzazz to any border, you can keep a Salvia in bloom in your garden until a hard frost.

Hardy Salvias Vs Temp Perennial Salvias

For big impact and problem solvers for tricky situations, including a heavy deer presence, I nearly always select one of the members of the perennial Salvia family, commonly known as Meadow Sage. When other plants start to fade, count on versatile Salvias to give you vibrant long-lasting color in a rich palette of pinks, purples, whites, and blues. Reliable rebloomers, you can count on extending your Salvia bloom from spring until the end of summer with careful selections. There is a plethora of tender Salvias, called temp perennials that will further extend your color show until the first frost hits as well.

The Skyscraper Salvias that come in a wild range of colors  are another outstanding tender Salvia which I love, but I use these purely for containers. I found when I planted them in a border, they sulked and didn’t perform well. But if you have a container with a Skyscraper, hummingbirds will flock to it.

But as a garden designer that specializes in creating colorful herbaceous borders in the mid-Atlantic region, I use the reliably hardy Salvias extensively in my designs and have found some that are more useful than others.

Marvelous Marvels

Salvia sylvestris May Night, a 1997 Perennial Plant of the Year, is an intense indigo-purple blooming performer that does well in the clay soil that we are ‘blessed’ with in the mid-Atlantic. But, I rarely use this one and instead pick one of the newer varieties for their more compact size, wider range of colors, and more floriferous habit. Salvia nemorosa Rose Marvel and Blue Marvel are truly little marvels in the landscape. Just 10-15 inches high (sometimes a bit taller), these long lasting plants have repeat blooms all summer long if you keep them dead headed with a quick slash of your trimmers or what the English call – the “Chelsea chop“. If you prefer to leave it alone, the stalky seed heads add interest and food for a wide range of birds, including finches.

The large flowered magenta pink spikes of Rose Marvel can be seen from far away and like all Salvias is a pollinator favorite, attracting bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. I have watched hummers zip in and out of Salvia flowers very methodically in search of nectar. Workhorses of the front of the border, grouping them together in drifts of three to six gives you a bigger impact. Readily available in nurseries, this is a no-brainer for deer-browsed sunny areas.

Eveline Salvia and Purple Rain

Salvia Eveline is a showy pastel pink salvia that you rarely see in gardens, but one of my favorites and selected by Piet Oudolf for its superior color and extra-long spikes of flowers. When it blooms, you just see flowers, no foliage, and it brings a soft pink to the border that blends well with most any other color. Very tough, it tends to wander around, but is easy to remove. A front-of-the-border plant, the foliage like most other Salvias, is a basal rosette of fragrance and the flowers are perfect for bouquets. Planted in front of my house, it becomes a sea of pink for weeks and will rebloom.

Salvia verticillata Purple Rain, another pollinator magnet, entices with its densely packed velvety purple blooms that can get 24” tall on upright reddish stems. The foliage is especially attractive with fuzzy, heart shaped leaves.  I saw this cultivar in Scotland for the first time and have used it in many gardens since for an eye-catching selection. I discovered a white cultivar of this beauty, alba, and am trying it out this season.

Early Bloomers

For the earliest blooming Salvia, I pull Sallyrosa April Night out of my quiver to extend the blooming season from mid-spring into summer. Electric violet-blue flowers appear a month earlier than the award-winning May Night and its petite size gets it a prime spot at the front of the border.

If you prefer a native Salvia, there are several semi-native Salvias that fit the bill and extend the color palette. Salvia greggii Heatwave Red or Autumn Sage is hardy to our zone and will bloom from May until frost.

This is a totally different animal from the other Salvias mentioned and is native to Texas, so enjoys hot and dry conditions. More shrub-like and woody than the other Salvias, it can grow up to two feet tall and is a blaze of color in the mid part of a border. There is a new Mirage series of Autumn Sages – Mirage Cherry Red, Cream, Salmon, Deep Purple, and Soft Pink – that I want to try out. I cut my Arctic Blaze back by 1/3, doing the Chelsea chop, in August to get another fiery flush of blooms to last the rest of the season.

My final last pick for a favorite sage is Salvia azurea ‘Nekan’, or Pitcher Sage, native to the southern US. Visiting the Delaware Botanic Gardens, I was struck by this Piet Oudolf meadow selection with spectacular sky-blue flowers and linear foliage. Extremely drought tolerant (the roots can extend 6-8 feet underground), this is one tough plant. Hardy to our area and with an open stature, I sought it out and now have several of them spotted through my garden. It needs some space, so I planted them towards the back of my borders, as it can grow four feet high.  Not aggressive, I plan on adding some more specimens and find that it does well in partial shade and think it should be more widely used.

 

USES FOR SALVIA IN THE LANDSCAPE

Possible to have salvias in bloom from mid-spring through late fall, here are my favorite ways to use them in the landscape:

• Xeriscape gardens –  Most salvia species are drought tolerant and good choices for drier gardens or gravel gardens.
• Annual bedding plants – The annual species S. farinacea or mealy cup salvia, are reliable vivid colors all summer long. They are also excellent for drying.
• Wild flower gardens or meadows – Native species, such as S. greggii, and S. azurea, and non-native species, such as  S. nemorosa, are excellent choices for this purpose because of their drought tolerance and easy care. The annual, Mealy Cup, is also beautiful in a meadow.

• Butterfly or pollinator gardens
• Hummingbird garden.  If you want to attract hummingbirds, red salvias, like Pineapple Sage, with its fruity scent and bright red tubular blossoms, is particularly effective.

• Deer-resistant gardens – Deer don’t like the strong scent of the foliage and have never seen deer browse on them.
• Mass plantings – Anything planted in a masse shows up better, particularly with salvias’ bright colors.
• Mixed borders – This is where I use them predominantly, particularly the Salvia nemerosa ones.
• Container gardens – I especially like the Skyscraper series for containers.

CARE AND MAINTENANCE OF SALVIA

• Sun requirements: Preferring full sun, salvias will tolerate a little shade in the afternoons.
• Soil: Salvias like average soil, not rich, with excellent drainage.  In fact, good drainage is especially critical in the winter for members of this genus. But even with my clay soil, I haven’t had a problem with overwintering these beauties.
• Moisture: Most Salvias are drought tolerant once established but will bloom better with regular watering.
• Deadheading/Pruning/Shearing: As with almost any flower, removing spent blooms with the Chelsea chop encourages a longer bloom time.
• Winter protection: For hardy varieties, leave foliage in place in autumn to protect the plant’s crown so freezing in the hollow stems won’t be a problem. Wait until late winter or early spring to cut the plants back.
• Propagation:  Many Salvia species can be grown from seed. The plants will move around in the garden bed from seed as well. Perennial species may be divided early in spring before new growth emerges.
• Plant Diseases: Salvias are prone to fungal diseases such as powdery mildew, rust, stem rot and fungal leaf spots. I find this happens if you plant a border too close together and you don’t have good air circulation. So, give the plants some space.
• Pests: Salvias may occasionally be bothered by insect pests, such as whiteflies, aphids, mealybugs and spider mites.  I have never had this problem and if you maintain healthy plants, they would be less susceptible to pest damage than unhealthy or stressed plants.

Excellent sources of food for all kinds of wildlife, especially for our Ruby Throated hummingbird, Salvia is a plant that keeps on giving throughout the growing season. Leaving the final spent stems for the birds, the stalks are easy to clean up in the spring for another round of blooming. Easy to pair with other blooming plants, especially Nepetas, make them a pleasure to design with.