Re: Salvia patens

At 09:01 PM 7/26/1999 -0700, you wrote:
>My Salvia patens is blooming in my half-barrel, and I must say I am
>shocked with wonder at the intensity of the flowers' coloring. They are
>not true blue -- more like a very intense deep indigo-violet -- but they
>are breathtaking. Salvia patens is of course not hardy in Zone 5b-6a
>Santa Fe. I want to overwinter my plant, but things I overwinter indoors
>tend to get terminal spider mite, or suddenly die just when March is
>peeking over the transom, so I must take cuttings and root them, I
>suppose. My question to you mulcherati out there is: can I root just any
>old piece of stem, or must I take my cuttings from nonflowering spikes,
>as I do with dianthuses?
>
>Rand B. Lee, Freelance Writer & Editor

Rand:

You need to take cuttings from rapidly-growing stems with basal leaves.
Cauline stems won't work very well.  You should try to winter over a cutting
with at least 4 - 6 weeks of growth to get a sizeable root system.

This is a fussy plant, and it likes time to rest.  In the winter, keep it
cool (not below 35 F) and dryish (not bone-dry) in bright sun.  It sometimes
wants to take a pause in summer as well.  It forms rhizomes and can come
back from them if they don't rot from extremes of dry and especially wet.

Your mention of the color got me to send you a JPG of a flower of variety
Cambridge Blue, which is a clear medium blue (separate post).  Using my
Adobe Photoshop tools, the RGB color channels indicate an excess of about
10% of green as compaired to red.  The species is the same hue, but darker
(it isn't really indigo or Prussian blue in my book, since these colors have
noticeable red in them - cobalt blue might be closer; the azure of the
copper mineral azurite is the purest dark blue I know).  The variety
Chilcombe is more of a blue-violet of about the same intensity as Cambridge
Blue, and is relatively new in the USA.

They don't necessarily come true from seed.  Cambridge Blue seeds will give
plants like the species with its darker flowers.

Colors are like odors - verbal characterizations are loaded with subjective
impressions.  Blue and purple are especially troublesome.  The Greeks didn't
have a word for it until later in their civilization, as I recall.  They
went from green to violet at first.  Since we try to make the visible part
of the continuous electromagnetic spectrum into a loop for artistic and
other conceptual purposes, we are bound to have problems with red/blue color
balances.  This is why getting true blues in ANY media is difficult, and why
such colors in flowers are really fascinating.  This accounts for a large
part of my interest in Salvias.

Richard F. Dufresne
313 Spur Road
Greensboro, NC  27406
336-674-3105
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