SAGE - A GARDEN BEAUTY

Purple Sage and Curly Parsley at the Denver Botanic Garden

Tri-color Sage in my Greenwich garden

The holiday feast would not be complete without a turkey and stuffing flavored with sage. If you have it growing in your garden you can rely on it to be available for the chef because it can be harvested over a long season.

As fall mellows and then chills, many garden plants become tattered and straggly tempting the gardener wielding clippers to make the garden tidy. There are leafy herbs that defy this trend and show their glory even through frost and light snow.  Lavender, rosemary, silver horehound, thyme and sage all put on a fine display until a heavy freeze or deeper snow.

One delicious and durable member of this group is Salvia officinalis.  The most common varieties have gray green leaves with a matte textured surface. However, I find the purple, gold and tricolor leafed sage plants impart color while also adding their traditional flavor in cooking. 

Late in October my husband, Jay, and I spent a happy week in Denver with our daughter and her family.  The Denver Botanic Gardens, a lustrous jewel in Cheesman Park has plentiful herbs in formal and informal plantings.  Sages seem to love the high dry climate.  They are more fragrant there than in my Connecticut yard.  The difference is most likely due to the intense sunlight in Colorado and Long Island Sound’s summer humidity. My yard has lots of shady areas and fewer hours of hot sun.