Golden Acre Home & Garden Centre's Plant Library

Other Names:  Culinary Sage

Description:

A beautifully heat and drought tolerant variety, featuring silver foliage with a deliciously, strong aroma; ideal for gardens, borders, containers and window sills; extremely flavorful, perfect for sauces, soups, stuffing and drying for seasoning

Edible Qualities

Garden Gray Sage is a perennial herb that is commonly grown for its edible qualities, although it does have ornamental merits as well. The fragrant narrow grayish green leaves with hints of silver can be harvested at any time in the season. The leaves have a savory taste and a strong fragrance.

The leaves are most often used in the following ways:

• Eating When Cooked/Prepared
• Cooking
• Drying
• Seasoning

Features & Attributes

Garden Gray Sage has masses of beautiful racemes of fragrant violet flowers with purple overtones rising above the foliage from early to mid summer, which are most effective when planted in groupings. The flowers are excellent for cutting. Its attractive fragrant narrow leaves remain grayish green in colour with hints of silver throughout the season.

This is an herbaceous perennial herb with a mounded form. Its medium texture blends into the garden, but can always be balanced by a couple of finer or coarser plants for an effective composition. This is a relatively low maintenance plant, and can be pruned at anytime. It is a good choice for attracting bees, butterflies and hummingbirds to your yard, but is not particularly attractive to deer who tend to leave it alone in favor of tastier treats. It has no significant negative characteristics.

Aside from its primary use as an edible, Garden Gray Sage is sutiable for the following landscape applications;

• Mass Planting
• Border Edging
• General Garden Use
• Naturalizing And Woodland Gardens
• Herb Gardens
• Container Planting

Planting & Growing

Garden Gray Sage will grow to be about 24 inches tall at maturity, with a spread of 18 inches. When grown in masses or used as a bedding plant, individual plants should be spaced approximately 20 inches apart. It grows at a medium rate, and under ideal conditions can be expected to live for approximately 9 years. As an herbaceous perennial, this plant will usually die back to the crown each winter, and will regrow from the base each spring. Be careful not to disturb the crown in late winter when it may not be readily seen!

This plant is quite ornamental as well as edible, and is as much at home in a landscape or flower garden as it is in a designated herb garden. It should only be grown in full sunlight. It prefers dry to average moisture levels with very well-drained soil, and will often die in standing water. It is considered to be drought-tolerant, and thus makes an ideal choice for a low-water garden or xeriscape application. It is not particular as to soil pH, but grows best in rich soils. It is somewhat tolerant of urban pollution. Consider applying a thick mulch around the root zone in winter to protect it in exposed locations or colder microclimates. This is a selected variety of a species not originally from North America.

Garden Gray Sage is a good choice for the edible garden, but it is also well-suited for use in outdoor pots and containers. It can be used either as 'filler' or as a 'thriller' in the 'spiller-thriller-filler' container combination, depending on the height and form of the other plants used in the container planting. It is even sizeable enough that it can be grown alone in a suitable container. Note that when growing plants in outdoor containers and baskets, they may require more frequent waterings than they would in the yard or garden. Be aware that in our climate, most plants cannot be expected to survive the winter if left in containers outdoors, and this plant is no exception. Contact our experts for more information on how to protect it over the winter months.