token and trowelgal, thank you so much, saved token's instructions. I'll try to do with the stubble that remains as trowelgal suggested, don't have paving stones but some bricks or glass blocks over cardboard might do along with plenty of leaves I have. I hate to buy new, too, but maintaining plants over the winter is getting to be a chore, still don't want to give it up. I grew Salvia Sangria from T&M from seeds a few years back, started too early in my sr, got crooked. So I tied them to little stakes. When I set them out, they straightened up, are interesting plants, and that was the only one of my flowers I saw a pair of hummingbirds go for. My neighbor tells me he had scads of them on his hisbiscus on his deck. The following year I tried a mix Salvia Salsa and added a purple. Those didn't do so well in back. Neither did the Blue Ribbon (looked pretty blue in the photo but more purple) ones I planted where I had had the Sangria the year before. They were disappointing. All annuals. I don't think I have any perennial ones although there are some for my zone. Burpee has what looks to be a beautiful Cathedral Mix, but they're pricey and you only get three plants, so I passed on those. Would love to try some of those from seeds though if they ever become available or may splurge next year if I don't have to buy more of the black and white. Thanks for posting the photos, enjoyed them. They never appealed to me but have grown on me.

From our experience in the last few years, most of the Black & Blue plants sold in the major nursery channels are from tissue cultured plants. It appears that the mother meristem tissue stock has declined, perhaps due to being grown in vitro for too long. The result are plants that grow with far less vigor than one would expect from this clone. This seems to be a nationwide issue. We have sought out alternate sources for new mother stock, but to date are not convinced that any of the these are free from the lack-of-vigor we have documented. So the short answer is no, I don't know right now where a B&B of old can be had. We are still evaluating a few sourced outside the typical channels and may be able to offer advice later in the season. For now we are pointing people to other Salvia guaranitica varieties.

I've always seen the flowers of Hot Lips as either a pure white or a strong medium red, with only variations in the boundaries of the zones. I have not seen any white/pink forms of Hot Lips (or any other plant)doing the same thing. Hot Lips is unique amongst all other flowering plants, to the best of my knowledge. Sun bleaching of the color to a lighter shade can happen in some selections, especially with Zaragoza. The older flowers fade in color on the second day, usually uniformly, giving the bush's flowers a multi saturated look. The hue does not shift towards salmon or coral, let alone to lavender or orange. That would define a third kind of color transition. One has to be careful with apparent hue shifts when unsaturating a particular hue. For instance, pink is not light red. It is more accurately defined as light magenta. Rose is on that axis also. You can experiment with colors in Photoshop's Color Picker, which lists colors in four different color spaces: CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black - colors when added darken the object by absorption of light, as in printing); RGB (red, green, blue - color when added together create ultimately white, as in monitors and in photography); HSB (hue, saturation, and black - where zero saturation and zero black is white, 100% saturation and zero black is the pure color, and 100% black is just that no matter what the other values are. The number of the hue is the color on a rainbow wheel, read like a clock from 0 [red] to 359). I have not begun to study L*a*b color, and it is not relevant anyway. Another color surprise is that by graying yellow, one can create a pseudo green, and these colors are found in images of leaves (again, play with the colors in Photoshop). Brown is hard to define, but is usually a grayed orange, with shifts to either the red or yellow side.

Blue angel is a selection of Salvia patens, which should definitely not be hardy in USDA Zone 6b. Are yoou in the arid southwestern states? That's the only way I can imagine they make it through the winter. They certainly won't make it through Zone 6b wet, subtropical southeastern US weather Also, they have tubers, and forest critters like pine voles will feast on them. Tuber and rhizome-bearing plants arise where there are no significant underground predators, such as in arid soils, with scree conditions (lots of crushed rock and drainage)