hot lips

I’ve heard salvia con­nois­seurs talk down about this plant, Salvia micro­phylla ‘Hot Lips,’ mostly because it’s get­ting to be so com­monly avail­able in areas where it grows eas­ily. But of all the sages in my gar­den this one has been the best performer.

Liv­ing in a sunny spot with dry-to-average gar­den water, the plants are cov­ered with these flow­ers year-round, hit­ting a peak in the fall.

salvia-hot-lips-grid

Com­mon or not, the flow­ers make the plant really inter­est­ing. Most are two col­ors, a com­bi­na­tion of scar­let and white, with no two flow­ers exactly alike. But often you’ll get flow­ers that are almost all white or all red. I’ve heard that cold weather seems to bring out the white, and that syncs up with what I’ve seen. But at the same time you’ll often still have multi-colored flowers–all on the same plant.

The growth habit is like a lot of sages, mean­ing the plant has the lines of a choco­late truf­fle left on a warm dash­board. For me, so far it grows about 30 inches tall by 60 wide. It’s sup­pos­edly hardy down around 20 degrees, but don’t expect many flow­ers when the frost starts up.

If you can grow it, this could be a good can­di­date for your list!

February 01 2009 01:30 pm | Categories: art • gardening • my garden • plant profiles • quotes | Tags: • •

4 Responses to “hot lips”

  1. Pam/Digging on 01 Feb 2009 at 6:24 pm #

    I like ‘Hot Lips’ too. I mean, how could you not with a name like that? I find that it does well in Austin even with some shade too.

  2. lostlandscape on 01 Feb 2009 at 7:00 pm #

    Pam, isn’t it great when the plant lives up to its name! Outstanding.

  3. susan (garden-chick) on 04 Feb 2009 at 11:14 am #

    I love it too, it is justly pop­u­lar. This was one of the plants offered for sale at the Gar­den Walk our Mas­ter Gar­dener Asso­ci­a­tion hosted last year, and this one sold out first. A nice com­ple­ment to the more com­mon pur­ple col­ored salvia cultivars.

    FYI love the melted truffed descrip­tion — I’m hijack­ing that phrase!

  4. lostlandscape on 04 Feb 2009 at 8:55 pm #

    Susan, I guess choco­late is never buried very deep in my thoughts! Feel free to recy­cle the phrase. I’ve been think­ing about plant shapes in rela­tion to food a lot lately. Tree-shopping pre­sented me with lots of lollipops…

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