Salvia mexicana

OK, if you have not figured it out yet..... we are totally nuts about hummingbird gardening. Here is one of our nutty experiments that did pay off with some hummingbird visits. But, for northern gardeners who are reading this, we caution you that it is a big risk to try this plant. Salvia mexicana blooms very late in the season. The plant in this photo was originally in the ground in the 2004 season. Just as it started to bloom in early October, we had our first hard frost. (In southern Wisconsin, it is typical for us to have a hard frost in the first week of October.) We decided to dig up the plant and overwinter it in a pot inside. In 2005, we placed Salvia mexicana back into the ground again. With this plant growing for two seasons, it became HUGE. The main trunk of the plant was hard and woody like a tree with a diameter of 4 to 5 inches. The height of the plant was 8 or 9 feet. In 2005, Salvia mexicana first bloomed on October 5. (We were watching the flower spikes for weeks. It seemed like it took forever for the flowers to finally open.) We were rewarded with a hummingbird visiting the flowers on October 14, four days before the last sighting in our yard. A valiant experiment, but we decided to leave this plant in the ground (where it was in 8 inches of snowcover in December 2005) and let it go. It was fun to see a hummer at it, but it takes up a tremendous amount of space and we would rather devote that space to other plants that will flower earlier in the season.