Best ways to use late-season salvias in your garden design
Salvias are some of the toughest plants you can grow. They tolerate clay soil, drought, high heat, and humidity — and deer don’t eat them. If you’re after low-maintenance, long-blooming color, salvias are hard to beat.
Some salvias send up flower spikes above neat mounds of foliage, while others have a looser, billowy look. Their growth habits play a big role in how you use them in your garden design, so let’s take a closer look at both styles.
Plant late-season salvias in mass
Take a look at the mealycup sage (Salvia farinacea) in the photo above and see how the flowers rise so uniformly above the dense foliage. Bunching multiples of these plants together creates an attractive and well-behaved mass of color. Because mealycup sages and the long-blooming anise-scented sages are generally larger than most other bedding plants, often around 1 to 3 feet tall and wide, they’re a perfect candidate for filling large spaces. You can get more bang for your buck and cover a lot of ground by using only four or five plants.
Add salvia to garden borders
Depending on your space, they are best planted in the middle or back of the border, becoming a good backdrop for low-growing annuals. Their spikes of flowers add excitement and draw attention upward. If they’re in the middle of the border, the eyes keep moving to what’s beyond. Both mealycup and anise-scented sages (Salvia guaranitica) bloom from summer and into fall, but will look much smaller at the beginning of the season. Give them space when you plant them in spring or summer so that they don’t get cramped and crowded.
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Salvia brings long-blooming color to containers
Not only do they work well planted in numbers, but one or two plants make an impact in containers. In small pots the bright blooming spikes of a larger variety could be the thriller, or focal point. Or use their upright blooms as an exciting filler in a bigger container — angle them slightly outward when planting so the flower spikes don’t get tangled up or lost in the midst of the thriller and other filler plants. Scarlet sage (Salvia splendens) and Skyscraper salvia work really well as filler plants.
But you’ll see in the windowbox in the photo above that scarlet sage can actually take the cake in a planting by the time fall rolls around. Pinch back the coleus in summer to give the sage room to take off. Soon it will be a stunning focal point and give the windowbox a whole new appearance for the change of seasons. Keep in mind that most sages grown as annuals are only available for purchase in the spring and summer, so plan ahead if you intend to use a certain kind as an important part of your garden in the fall.
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Make a statement in the garden with late-season salvias
Mexican bush sage (Salvia leucantha) (above) and Pineapple sage (Salvia elegans) (below) are two species that put on a show for only one season: the fall. The shorter days stimulate their blooms. Because of this, they aren’t always available for purchase in colder zones with early frosts because just as their blooms are getting started, they sometimes get nipped.
But their massive size and dramatic appearance give them an irreplaceable spot in the fall garden. They grow up to 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide and have loose habits with long flower spikes that are more likely to curve and dangle. Because they put on one big fantastic show, rather than blooming consistently all season, use only one to three plants and work them throughout your garden as statements.
Combine salvia with classic fall perennials
It’s not a surprise that late-blooming sages look good with other perennial fall favorites. A collection of round, compact garden mums (Chrysanthemum hybrids) planted around the base of Mexican bush sage or pineapple sage gives these salvias more form and contrasts impressively with their looseness.
Combine late-season sages with maiden grasses (Miscanthus sinensis) so flowers and seedheads mix and mingle or with feather reed grass (Calamagrostis x acutiflora), whose dense foliage is a backdrop for the blooms. Arkansas amsonia (Amsonia hubrichtii) will provide pretty blue blooms in late spring while sages are still getting started, and then can play a supporting role in fall as the foliage turns an attractive yellow. Or annuals with colorful maroon or purple foliage, such as coleus (Plectranthus scutellarioides), offer color in seasons before the salvias bloom.
