Addisonia 77 



(Plate 119) 

 SALVIA FARINACEA 

 Gray Salvia 



Native of Texas and New Mexico and adjacent Mexico 

 Family Lamia cbab Mint Family 



Salvia farinacea Benth, Lab. Gen. & Sp. 274. 1833. 



A perennial plant two to three feet tall, with mealy blue or pale 

 blue calyxes, and violet or purple corollas. The pubendent stems are 

 usually branched. The leaves are opposite, but often, by the 

 development of short leafy branches in their axils, appearing as if 

 in clusters. The blades, commonly on slender petioles less than 

 an inch long, vary considerably in shape, ranging from linear- 

 lanceolate to ovate, but more frequently of the narrower types, and 

 are up to three inches long and an inch and a quarter wide, but 

 usually less than an inch wide; the surfaces are more or less 

 pubescent, and the margins entire, undulate or serrate. The 

 flowers, in racemes up to ten inches long on long naked stalks, are 

 in rather close whorls of a dozen or more. The calyx is three 

 sixteenths to a quarter of an inch long and tubular-bell-shaped, 

 has prominent nerves, and is at first of a steel blue, fading paler; 

 it is covered with a white pubescence which gives it a mealy appear- 

 ance. The corolla is violet or purple, up to five eighths of an inch 

 long, pubescent externally, two-lipped; the upper lip is hooded, 

 erect, about half as long as the four-lobed spreading lower lip. 



As a perennial plant this has not proven hardy at the New York 

 Botanical Garden, but as a hardy annual it has been very successful. 

 Self-sown seeds germinate freely in the spring, giving an abundance 

 of seedlings which require vigorous thinning out. Its deep-colored 

 corollas in contrast with the calyxes and gray fohage give it a strik- 

 ing appearance, and make it a valued addition to the gray border. 

 The species has been in the collections of the New York Botanical 

 Garden since 1915, and it is from plants from self-sown seed that 

 the drawing has been prepared. 



The genus Salvia, comprising over five hundred species widely 

 distributed in temperate and tropical regions, has furnished many 

 plants of horticultural value, there being more than fifty now 

 in cultivation in this country. One of the commonest of these, 

 both in the border and as a bedding plant, is the scarlet sage. Salvia 

 splendens, a native of Brazil; its blazing color is conspicuous up 

 to the time of frost. Another species, of widely different appear- 

 ance, is Salvia argentea, the fohage densely covered with long silvery 



