Greg's Greg's mystery garden Salvia microphylla

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This is one of many pages describing plants and animal life that we have in our garden. In many cases, we don't know what they are. Comments welcome.

By default the photos on this page are relatively small (“thumbnails“). Click on them to get progressively larger photos.

After visiting the Royal Melbourne Botanical Gardens on Saturday, 14 June 2008, we have established that this is a Salvia microphylla.

These two photos show the similarity best. The first photo was taken of one of ours, in the summer. The second was taken at the Botanical Gardens in winter.

It looks quite like another variety, Salvia elegans (“pineapple sage”), but that bush has longer and more pronounced bright red flowers with black stems:

There seems to be a fair amount of difference of opinion on Salvia microphylla. Some call it watermelon sage, others blackberry sage, and nothing I've found on the web mentions the mint-like smell of the leaves, which the sample in the Botanical Gardnes also had. But then, Salvia elegans is supposed to smell like pineapple, and I didn't smell that on the sample I saw at the Botanical Gardens. There's also a variety of opinion on the size of the plant, though all agree that it flowers almost continuously. There also seem to be different cultivars, one of which has red and white flowers. None of the links on the web look quite like ours.

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