I enjoyed reading this more, and understood it brtter, after hearing your description in our Native Plant Garden Club meeting. What an amazing, complex, and efficient process! Thanks for teaching me so much, and so clearly!
After carefully looking, the sulphur butterfly on the sage is Colias eurytheme, the orange sulphur. The orange sulphur and the clouded sulphur look very similar from the underside. Much easier to identify from the top side. :-)
I think I could spend a good bit of time studying Sages and Salvias! There are so many various types. This Blue Sage, Salvia azurea is new to me and so remarkable for the color and beauty of the flowers, let alone its unique relationship with the bee and 'head high height!'. I am curious, does the plant have a sage fragrance? I will be looking into whether or not it might cross pollinate with other sages. For my purposes, I would prefer that it did not. I have an older culinary sage bush that produces purple flowers that the bees also love and is wonderful for use in cooking. It sheds it's greyish green leaves in late winter, but comes back to life with the warmth of spring. The rest of the year it has many different and interesting displays. Sometime green, sometimes gold and very eye catching with it's purple blooms. It is perfectly suited for the dryer summer we are now experiencing up here in the PacNW. I do remove the bare spent flower stalks and occasionally thin it, to keep it looking its best. I find pulling a milking stool up close to the bush to tend to it, rather meditative. It also has the lovely ability to make new plants with simply stressing a lower limb by bending it back on itself, then watering the ground below it, burying the still connected stem and placing a heavy rock on it. Next spring voila! You have a new baby sage plant! :-) Some years ago, I ordered a type of sage from Thompson Seeds in England that sadly is no longer available. It was a smaller 18 inch high sage plant that never bloomed (?!) but had very pretty small leave which were tipped in either blue or pink! I loved these plants for producing wonderful long lasting bouquet fillers! Sadly, it turned out that they were not winter hardy. I have not been able to replace them. But I keep looking! :-) You can be sure I will be checking out 'the action' between the bees and my purple sage next spring!
I haven't noticed much scent from Blue Sage. Not like the sage I use in cooking, anyway. As for cross pollination, experts say that it doesn't cross with other sages. There are 1000 species of Salvia in the world. They all have the lever mechanism to one degree or another, but they are so specific as to which insects can pollinate them that they just don't get mixed up very often. A bee that can pick up pollen from Blue Sage will not be shaped quite right to deliver the pollen to another sage. I wish I had another sage on my land to look at closely, but the only one I have is Blue Sage.
Thank you for this information Diane. Now you have me even more eager to watch my purple sage next spring and see which bees are gathering pollen from it. And to see how they fit into the blossoms. The structure of the bush is quite different than your Blue Sage. More rounded with around a hundred foot tall flowering stems that die back after the blossoms fall off. It's only about waist high. It is completely through with blooming this year, otherwise I would send you some blooms. Funny thing about sage is that you have to bump against it to notice the scent. Then it is usually quite strong on my sage bush. Reminds me of tomato plants, in that regard. Thanks again for all you do to enlighten us!! :-)
I hope this is really a link to the garden, Diane. I am a member of a national organization called Wild Ones. Our chapter president and her husband created this garden and invited artists to create pieces to be displayed there. It is a fabulous place to visit on the side of a low mountain, filled with many different areas of native plantings and trails around the property, leading to them. If you are ever in PA you should visit it.
Love the blue color of the sage among all the yellow flowers of fall! Thank you for the first plants for my garden! I'm planting more from the seeds those pollinators provided!!
Such fun to see your video of the plant action to be pollinated 🙏
Watching your video of a flower’s simple, profound technology to both reproduce itself and share its sweetness has provided an awesome experience to start my day!
So cool! Thanks for going to the work to give us the view through your microscope of the grass stem triggering the pollen sacs to drop down. Aren't the intricacies of the relationships that weave this world amazing? It makes me smile to read your posts, and to experience how you cultivate humans' innate terraphilia. Blessings!
Diane, I forgot to ask for your permission to republish this post. These are gorgeous photos.
Yes, of course. Can you include the 18-second movie of the anthers descending? I could email you the movie file if that would be of any help.
Yes, please email the movie file.
Lovely.
I enjoyed reading this more, and understood it brtter, after hearing your description in our Native Plant Garden Club meeting. What an amazing, complex, and efficient process! Thanks for teaching me so much, and so clearly!
I don't know how many people at the meeting actually tried the experiment. When I did it myself, I was completely surprised.
I love seeing how nature works.
Sometimes I just have to wonder who thinks this stuff up.
After carefully looking, the sulphur butterfly on the sage is Colias eurytheme, the orange sulphur. The orange sulphur and the clouded sulphur look very similar from the underside. Much easier to identify from the top side. :-)
Thank you Moni!
I think I could spend a good bit of time studying Sages and Salvias! There are so many various types. This Blue Sage, Salvia azurea is new to me and so remarkable for the color and beauty of the flowers, let alone its unique relationship with the bee and 'head high height!'. I am curious, does the plant have a sage fragrance? I will be looking into whether or not it might cross pollinate with other sages. For my purposes, I would prefer that it did not. I have an older culinary sage bush that produces purple flowers that the bees also love and is wonderful for use in cooking. It sheds it's greyish green leaves in late winter, but comes back to life with the warmth of spring. The rest of the year it has many different and interesting displays. Sometime green, sometimes gold and very eye catching with it's purple blooms. It is perfectly suited for the dryer summer we are now experiencing up here in the PacNW. I do remove the bare spent flower stalks and occasionally thin it, to keep it looking its best. I find pulling a milking stool up close to the bush to tend to it, rather meditative. It also has the lovely ability to make new plants with simply stressing a lower limb by bending it back on itself, then watering the ground below it, burying the still connected stem and placing a heavy rock on it. Next spring voila! You have a new baby sage plant! :-) Some years ago, I ordered a type of sage from Thompson Seeds in England that sadly is no longer available. It was a smaller 18 inch high sage plant that never bloomed (?!) but had very pretty small leave which were tipped in either blue or pink! I loved these plants for producing wonderful long lasting bouquet fillers! Sadly, it turned out that they were not winter hardy. I have not been able to replace them. But I keep looking! :-) You can be sure I will be checking out 'the action' between the bees and my purple sage next spring!
I haven't noticed much scent from Blue Sage. Not like the sage I use in cooking, anyway. As for cross pollination, experts say that it doesn't cross with other sages. There are 1000 species of Salvia in the world. They all have the lever mechanism to one degree or another, but they are so specific as to which insects can pollinate them that they just don't get mixed up very often. A bee that can pick up pollen from Blue Sage will not be shaped quite right to deliver the pollen to another sage. I wish I had another sage on my land to look at closely, but the only one I have is Blue Sage.
Thank you for this information Diane. Now you have me even more eager to watch my purple sage next spring and see which bees are gathering pollen from it. And to see how they fit into the blossoms. The structure of the bush is quite different than your Blue Sage. More rounded with around a hundred foot tall flowering stems that die back after the blossoms fall off. It's only about waist high. It is completely through with blooming this year, otherwise I would send you some blooms. Funny thing about sage is that you have to bump against it to notice the scent. Then it is usually quite strong on my sage bush. Reminds me of tomato plants, in that regard. Thanks again for all you do to enlighten us!! :-)
Here in Maine there are no Blue Sage…it’s usually colder at the
Autumn Equinox. Here’s my observation:
SEPTEMBER BEES
The bees
are sluggish
this time of year
confused by the cold
They seem
only half awake
as if sleep-flying
Dreaming of flowers
no longer in bloom
Landing on
inappropriate objects—
like myself
Even on the clover
they seem
to have forgotten
what they’re there for
And buzz off slowly
bumping into things
as they
bumble on
sleep-flying... so nice. All of it a pleasure to read. Thank you!
https://share.google/zujl0HjSngvryS9i2
I hope this is really a link to the garden, Diane. I am a member of a national organization called Wild Ones. Our chapter president and her husband created this garden and invited artists to create pieces to be displayed there. It is a fabulous place to visit on the side of a low mountain, filled with many different areas of native plantings and trails around the property, leading to them. If you are ever in PA you should visit it.
Yes, the link works. What a great spot. Something really special.
What an informative posting. Thank you so much. I loved it.
I'm in awe of your perfect photo of a hummingbird moth.
OMG--what a remarkable video! Thank you for this closeup view of an amazing symbiosis! (Upgrading today: I love your work.)
Wow, Susan, thank you so much!
Love the blue color of the sage among all the yellow flowers of fall! Thank you for the first plants for my garden! I'm planting more from the seeds those pollinators provided!!
Such fun to see your video of the plant action to be pollinated 🙏
Can you narrow down the yellow butterfly any more than to Colias?
I love that video! How interesting to see the demonstration of how the interaction works.
I was struck by how mechanical and precise the action was.
Watching your video of a flower’s simple, profound technology to both reproduce itself and share its sweetness has provided an awesome experience to start my day!
Aww, Sallie, thank you.
Diane, I get so much pleasure from your posts. I feel like I've been pollinated! Thank you for your careful research and documentation.
Thanks so much Sharon and Fax. I'm feeling sort of pollinated myself now.
So cool! Thanks for going to the work to give us the view through your microscope of the grass stem triggering the pollen sacs to drop down. Aren't the intricacies of the relationships that weave this world amazing? It makes me smile to read your posts, and to experience how you cultivate humans' innate terraphilia. Blessings!
wonderful