salvia 'amistad' | why sarah loves this
One of my absolute favourite plants. Incredible flowers, excellent performance and loved by pollinators.
One of my absolute favourite plants is Salvia ‘Amistad’. Its flowers have the most delicious velvet texture. You want to make a dress, you want to clad yourself in that wonderful, wonderful soft, velvety silken texture in incredible rich dark purply-blue. AND, it’s not just that, it’s such a good performer. It comes into flower, often in June, and goes on flowering. So, I’m standing now in the garden and it’s nearly November and it’s still in absolute full flower.
The pollinators love it, as soon as the sun comes out, it’ll be covered in honeybees, and you’ll get the odd butterfly visit too.
It’s a tender perennial, which means that if you get a really hard frost it will be killed, but we find here in East Sussex, it seems to be hardy in a sheltered spot particularly, and we will mulch it with about 2 or 3 inches of compost as the frosts cut it down in November/December time, and then it comes back, sprouting up again full of energy in April to come into flower in 6 to 8 weeks’ time. Honestly there really are few better garden plants.
