Good morning ruth_ann! Hope your day is starting off well :). Kindest regards for your reply! Congratulations that you were able to have success in getting your Brug seeds to grow & thrive :). Wow, over 15 yrs growing these, eh? My hat's off to you! Since this is my first go with these plants, I'm slowly learning what works for me in my area & what doesn't; I discovered mine could not tolerate being in full sun in the summer & preferred filtered, but now that autumn's here it can handle being in full sun. I was alternating feeding them MG one week & a fish & seaweed emulsion the next & my Brugs seemed to like it at first but recently I noticed certain limbs look a bit leggy & they're more leafy than I care for at the expense of flowers so I'm definitely not going to be using MG with F&SW anymore. Way too much nitrogen! Oops! Since this is the baby Brug's first yr of life, should I cut it back or leave it? I know I need to enrich their soil next yr since they're in a pot & have probably used up what was available but since the weather's turning cooler than usual sooner than usual here I don't think I have time to do anything more with them except let them start going dormant. Yours only get 4 months to put on their show? Either way it must be quite a sight. Which has been your favorite to grow?

The last 2 years I have found large pots of clems at a bargain price in November. I dug holes near the foundation, sunk the entire pots in the ground, put a green chicken wire around & filled the wire circle with about 12" of chopped leaves. All 5 I have done this way grew in the spring. Then I pulled up the pots & planted in their permanent location. Felt it was to cold too plant in Nov here in NE Iowa. Good luck!

Sorry, I can't answer your question, since I'm not in your zone; I'm sure it's mainly a zone problem, since SAC is often rated to Z5. Maybe this plant answers your zone uncertainty, though, and puts you more firmly in Z4. On the other hand, if you really want to grow it, and if you're ever coming near Cape Cod, I can give you as many SACs as you can fit into your car. Maybe the "wild ones" would do better than the ones from the nurseries - do you think there's a chance that you may inadvertently be buying southern-grown plants? Our low temperatures don't often get into single digits, but our winters are cold, damp, and long here. SAC grows wild along alleys and in untended lots, and reseeds freely in the garden (in unwanted numbers). My sister lives in rural NJ, in zone 6, and has never had this problem; though it grows well there, it doesn't reseed.

The summer was a tale of three salvia gardens. Two were well established and a third, a newly planted xeric one with no access to water. Here in SW New Jersey we saw weather much like Richard's in North Carolina, but with a slightly different pattern. Rainfall here was well below average from the beginning of June all the way into September, and while we probably saw a little more rain, most of it came in spotty thunderstorms that struggled to maintain themselves. In the well watered gardens the microphyllas and greggii and their hybrids grew quite well. There was continuous bloom on Orange Door, Raspberry Delight, Wild Thing, Navaho Bright Red and a half dozen others. This surprised me a bit. Even at the xeric site the same plants were in continuous if light bloom right through to frost. The size of these xeric grown plants was about half the size of the irrigated ones. Maybe they would have grown more if they had been fed in mid summer, but because of the drought I was afraid to do so. Some other sages never did reach their full size. Involucrata made no attempt to put out a few mid summer blooms like it usually does. Waverly also waited until September. Indigo Spires was not nearly as vigorous as in other years. As the summer went on the guarantica Brazil slowly declined and by early fall were mere shadows of their July selves. The only guarantica to thrive was Van Remsen, it put on a show of a lifetime out in the vegetable garden in August. Mulberry Jam grew just fine, but since it was my first try for the hybrid I have no idea whether it was "normal" Salvia subrotunda did not like the drought at all. The patches that were watered show no ill effects and behaved as usual but attempts to grow them in drier leaner soil verged on failures. Under similar lean conditions the various coccinea cultivars did better. In the xeric beds bloom was delayed by as much as a month and the plants were smaller, but they did OK. Upright macrophylla was new to me so I don't know if an August bloom is late for this species and although the bloom was light the beauty of the flowers made up for that. Splendens Pink from Ginny Hunt didn't bloom until almost September and never seemed happy, I may not grow it again. Uliginosa was skimpy and late. My main patch at a nearby nature center suffered its second year of pretty much total deer destruction. You have to respect a deer which can eat that nasty stuff. The big and total failure of the year was praeclara. The plants hardly grew and by the look of the leaves suffered from some sort of disease. Whatever that disease was it did not spread to the nearby subrotunda. Chiapensis and buchananii grew OK I guess although I would have liked to see more flowers on the later and an earlier bloom on the former. Both were new to me so maybe their growth was normal.