Thread by @UrsulaV

Right! Here is your friendly neighborhood Salvia enthusiast weighing in to remind my fellow white people that white sage (Salvia apiana) is sacred to indigenous people, many of which have expressed the desire that we leave it alone because we’re killing it all off!

I am not equipped to talk about the spiritual side, but boy, can I talk about Salvia cultivation, and boy, is S. apiana in a world of hurt! Let’s talk about why!

White sage is a shrub that lives in coastal sage scrub, on the edge of the desert. Amazing habitat, coastal scrub. Still is, even though it has been badly overgrazed by cattle. Cattle don’t eat sage, but they do eat a lot of other things, and their hooves cut up the soil.

If people would graze it responsibly, it wouldn’t be a problem, but they often don’t. This makes it very hard to sustain the habitat. But even that might be survivable, except that developers looooove this area. And a sage that survives cows cannot survive paving over.

But let’s say you’re a tough-ass S. apiana that lived through cows and avoided developers. Go you!

Except there’s a wildfire. Unprecedented wildfires, in fact.

Ok, you dodged that. You are one lucky plant.

Here come the harvesters.

See, smudge sticks are BIG business. They sell them everywhere. Most, I hope, are not true S. apiana but another species that looks similar, but a lot of them are the real thing, because hoo boy did white America run with smudging in a big way.

So you get people trying to supply this demand and just razing whole hillsides down to the roots, and then selling it as wild harvested, which it was, for a definition of harvest that includes clear cutting. Sometimes from indigenous reservations!

Now, people will tell you white sage isn’t technically endangered. They are technically correct. It is, in fact, listed as “not evaluated.”

THAT IS NOT BETTER

Do you know how many plants and animals go extinct before anybody gets around to a formal evaluation!? No, you don’t, and neither does anybody else, because most of them never actually GET evaluated, they just die.

Not Evaluated just means you haven’t seen the doctor, not that you’re not dying of cancer, lycanthropy, and third-degree burns.

What I CAN tell you, as a Salvia enthusiast—that’s the whole genus, not the one that gets you high—is that S. apiana is a very specialized plant. It lives where it lives and pretty much only where it lives.

It is very hard to find in the nursery trade outside of California, and that’s honestly fine, because it’s very hard to grow outside of California. Seed germination is low. Compared to other sages, it doesn’t like to root from cuttings.

And while the motto of Clan Salvia could be “well-drained soil only!” S. apiana takes this to extremes. It goes dormant in summer. If you try to grow it in a climate where it rains during the summer, it drops dead of root rot.

If you overwater it for a week when it doesn’t want to be watered, it drops dead of root rot. If you grow it in soil it doesn’t like (well-drained coarse gritty loam OR dry clay slope) it drops dead of root rot.

Possibly some of you are seeing a trend here.

Anybody who tells you that white sage is easy to grow in the garden from seed is A) trying to sell you something, B) has been lied to by someone who was trying to sell them something or C) lives in the coastal scrub region of its habitat or a doppelgänger thereof.

The nursery I get most of my weird Salvia fix from, Flowers By The Sea, has a whole guide to growing S. apiana, the upshot of which is “you probably can’t.” I would need an arid greenhouse before I even tried. I’d have more luck with saguaros.

So. Please, please, I beg of you, my fellow white people snd well-meaning pagans and all the rest, resist the commodification of Salvia apiana. It is being chewed up by the demand for it from people like us, it can’t survive, and indigenous people are sounding the alarms.

It can’t keep going like this. Even if it had more formal study, at the rate the government moves, it could be down to remnant shrubs in people’s yards before it ever got around to being listed as threatened.

(Also, if you’re a gardener who wants the look, I strongly suggest either S. argentea or a nice Lamb’s Ear. Same silver effect, not a shrub, not endangered, not nearly so specialized.)

Further Reading: unitedplantsavers.org/what-is-going-…

ETA: Salvia is a gigantic genus, encompassing literally thousands of species, of which S. apiana is only one. This thread is about one, very specific species. You want advice on other salvias, hit me up, they’re fabulous plants and I love them.

Extra ETA: Beloved friends, if someone is selling online you what they claim are Salvia apiana seeds, pleeeease check their other wares because there are a lot of frauds out there who are counting on you deciding that you screwed up when it germinates into an eggplant.