Salvia elegans, pineapple sage

Pineapple sage, with its brilliant red flowers, scented leaves and neat shape, is a wonderful plant for the garden. The botanical name is Salvia elegans. I got my first pineapple sage plant as a scrawny slip from the $2 stand at a local nursery. I had never heard of it before, but the scent of the leaves made it seem like like a good addition to the herb garden. When it grew to a good-sized bush and was covered with red flowers through the first winter, I came to realise its true worth in the…

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Salvias, six months on

Six months after buying my first serious lot of salvias, they are looking great. They have flowered through an unusually harsh summer with some weeding and a few waterings to keep them from wilting. On the back of that success I have recently acquired another 26 to expand the collection. The first twelve When I first decided to try salvias it was hard to know which ones to order. Fortunately Sue Templeton at Unlimited Perennials offers sets of 12 of her choice which she selects for your conditions, so I…

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Salvias, a new garden theme

For the past couple of months I have been establishing a Salvia (sage) garden. They seem to be an ideal plant for our conditions, and I’m hoping they will have the potential to fill the bank under the house with colour and interest. Usually with Salvias you think of the eye-catching red and blue bedding types, which are always available in punnets for seasonal colour, but the variety of forms and colours goes way beyond those two, and collections of more than a hundred types seem to be standard with…

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Autumn colour

Autumn here is a mild season. It is accented by a flush of flowers, from orchids to vegetables, but an outstanding group of plants now is the salvias. Here our Autumn colour comes from flowers rather than changing leaves. Pineapple sage has leaves with an attractive pineapple/tangerine scent which can be used like mint as a drink garnish. It also has bright red flowers. It is forming the middle layer of a nice tiered display in our herb garden at the moment, with basil in the foreground and chia (also a Salvia) reaching for the…

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Oncidium orchids

Oncidium orchids are great decorative plants for subtropical gardens and apartments. They flower twice in the year, Autumn and Spring, and are ideal for bringing in as a showy houseplant. I have two types; one with sweetly vanilla scented burgundy flowers on very large spikes, and a smaller one with dense spikes of yellow flowers. The yellow one is easy to divide, so I have a few pots which conveniently manage to flower a few weeks apart. The orchid world is full of complex crosses, and Oncidium is a catch-all for…

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Orchids in trees: Oncidium and Miltonia

Orchids are amazing! Growing up in Perth with hot bone-dry Summers and wet Winters, I would see them as plants for enthusiasts only, and we didn’t see the huge variety that are available now. When you’ve got the right climate though, they flourish in the toughest spots. In a bit of a faith leap, I planted out a set of orchids into trees above the house back in Winter; these two as well as Dendrobiums and a Cymbidium. It was partly to get them off the ground, where rats were prone…

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Pineapple sage

Although a great fan of standard sage (Salvia officinalis) and also of the flowering salvias, I didn’t know about pineapple sage (Salvia elegans, for an updated post click here) until I saw a scrawny cutting in the $2 section of a nursery last Spring. Now, I’m really glad I got it. It’s a fine looking plant with added flavour benefits.

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