Salvia guaranitica, for Hummingbirds
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- October
- 16
If you’d like to draw hummingbirds to your garden — and who wouldn’t, right? — try planting an annual known as Salvia guaranitica.
Sandy Morrissey, a great birder who lives in Hartsdale, calls it the “No. 1 plant for attracting hummingbirds.” She often buys dozens of pots of Salvia guaranitica in the spring to give away to friends.
Common names for this showy salvia include blue anise sage, Brazilian sage and anise sage. The most common cultivar I’ve seen in local nurseries is called ‘Black and Blue.’
As they zip about like superheroes, hummingbirds are so much fun to have in your garden. They have a particular affinity for tubular-shaped flowers.
‘Black and Blue’ offers dark-blue tubular flowers in mid- to late summer. By October, this shrubby annual grows 3 to 5 feet tall.
In warmer southern states like Georgia and Florida, Salvia guaranitica is a perennial that dies back to the ground in winter and then reemerges in spring.
Like other salvias, it wants full sun, humus-rich soil with sharp drainage and moderate water. As you’d expect with any plant in the sage family, this one is deer resistant.
This entry was posted
on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 2:47 pm by Bill Cary.
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Bill Cary grew up in Louisville, Ky. His gardening was limited to growing parsley and impatiens on the windowsill of Manhattan walkups until the mid-1990s when he bought a rundown old chicken farm on 8 acres in the Hudson Valley. Now he spends his weekends chasing deer, hacking away at invasive shrubs and vines and wondering why he doesn`t have more meadow and less lawn.
This is interesting since we always hear the hummingbirds are attracted to red colored flowers. I have seen them feed from lantana and blooms of other colors as well.