Salvia adenophora is a robust plant here. It grows over 3 metres tall on straight and sturdy canes through the Summer, then flowers right through the shorter days with an abundance of bright red blooms in upright spikes.
In warm climates adenophora will have sporadic flowers throughout the year, but the main flowering season begins in mid-Autumn. It makes a useful display before the main Winter show of S. gesneriiflora et al get going.
The leaves are mid green and heart shaped, glossy above with sharply embossed veins, and greyed a little from minute scaly hairs below. Stems are almost circular in cross section, and become woody with age.
Flowers are 25 mm long, a shining orange red, with green calyces. The upper and lower lips are only around 1/3 of the flower length. Flower spikes are up to 300 mm long with a fairly full effect, so that individual spikes show clearly among leaves.
S. adenophora grows easily from seedlings and cuttings. It also makes natural cuttings by layering if the stems get knocked over and touch the ground, which they often do as they become so tall and top-heavy. In our (humid) conditions stems put out aerial roots, which also make taking cuttings easy, just lie the stems down in trenches in the garden and water in, or sit the cut stems in a bucket of water for a few days to get the roots growing.
Here it is a fairly assertive plant, so I keep it for the back of robust plantings where it won’t overshadow or crash through. It has survived drought here without watering, and can wilt severely before recovering. In Spring after peak flowering it can be cut back to ground level and will re-grow on tall vertical canes through the Summer.