Salvia verbenaca (Wild Clary Sage)
Wild clary is a plant with more history than glamour. Salvia verbenaca forms a flat rosette of deeply lobed, crinkled dark green leaves, and from it sends up whorled spikes of small violet-blue hooded flowers on square stems. The whole plant is aromatic when brushed. It is a Mediterranean species, long naturalised in New Zealand, and flowers through summer from December to March.
Its place is in a herb bed, a wildflower planting, or a dry sunny corner where a tidy border plant would be wasted. Bees work the flowers heavily. The name comes from the Latin for clear: the seeds were once soaked to make a mucilage used to clean grit from the eye. That is history rather than a recommendation.
Give it full sun and free-draining soil, and expect it to look after itself. It handles poor stony ground, drought and neglect. Be clear-eyed about one thing: it self-seeds very freely, and it has been naturalised here since the 1880s, so plant it where seedlings are welcome and cut the spikes before seed drops if they are not.
Reaches around 0.6 to 1 m in flower from a low rosette of leaves.
Trimming: Cut flowered spikes down at the base once the flowers finish, which is also the simplest way to keep it from seeding across the garden. Tidy the rosette in late winter by pulling away dead leaves.
Deadheading: Deadhead thoroughly and early if you want to control it. Wild clary sets seed readily, including from flowers that never fully open, so waiting until the spikes look finished is often too late.
Fertilising: None needed. This is a plant of poor dry ground and feeding produces soft growth with no benefit to the flowering.
Watering: Water only to establish. After that it is properly drought tolerant and more likely to suffer from wet winter soil than from a dry summer.
Pest Control: Very few problems. Slugs and snails may graze the rosette in a wet spring, and aphids occasionally gather on the flower spikes.
Disease Management: Powdery mildew can mark the leaves in humid weather. Root rot follows heavy waterlogged ground, so drainage matters more than anything else.
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