Pollinators love salvias
I’ve been a bee, and I can tell you the job they do is hard work.
My experience at being a bee came courtesy of the Texas A&M University peach breeding program, when I was a graduate student long ago. After building makeshift, tent-type greenhouses over a few peach trees, we set about removing the male flower parts of each and every flower.
Next, I was required to use a tiny brush and apply pollen to each and every female flower. Even with a couple of us bees in the greenhouse, this was a laborious task.
Such is the scenario that goes on each and every year with our farmers and ranchers as bees, wasps, butterflies, birds and even bats carry on pollination and thus our plant life, both fruits and seeds come into production.
But what it basically boils down to is: No pollinators means no food to eat.
As we still have much of the summer to go and still time to plant all sorts of flowers in our landscape for both beauty and pollinators, I would like to suggest salvias, also commonly called sages. There are so many great salvias — natives, imports and hybrids — that offer much to the landscape. Most produce spiky flowers that stand tall in the garden. Every day I watch both hummingbirds and an assortment of bees visiting my salvias.
Recently, I was able to visit the trial gardens at Young’s Plant Farm in Auburn, Ala.; there was something magical going on as bees were visiting a new salvia called Big Blue.
Big Blue has been on the market in limited quantities this year and is sure to be a hit for years to come. It is the first seed-produced Indigo Spires-type salvia. This represents one of the horticultural mysteries of life as PanAmerican Seed is introducing this cross of Salvia farinacea and S. longis-
picata to the industry in seeds. To this point, it has all been by vegetative propagation.
You’ll love Big Blue, as it looks so glorious with bountiful blue spikes bringing in the bees and butterflies. But in the meantime, know that salvias — whether they be blue, pink or red, whether they are annuals or perennials, they all will serve a wonderful purpose: to sustain bees, butterflies and hummingbirds.
Norman Winter is a horticulturist, garden speaker and author of “Tough-as-Nails Flowers for the South.”