Sage Plant
Sage is a beautiful bush with silvery green leaves and purple flowers in the spring. It makes a great specimen bush or a back drop for your other herbs or flowers. In Central Ohio is stays green and does not lose it’s leaves in the winter. It may look a little freeze-dried at the end of winter, but it will perk back up in early spring. It thrives in the hot summer sun and needs little care. I have it in two very sunny, hot areas and have never watered it. I have a sage bush in the herb garden and the one in the picture is a volunteer. I figured it picked the spot it liked so I let it grow. In the spring it will produce beautiful purple flowers; I cut them and place them throughout the house. Beautiful.
I had some questions about trimming back and dividing a sage plant. As you can see a sage is a bush with a main stalk, very woody and cannot be divided. To share, look under the sage shrub for baby (starts) plants. These can be easily dug up and shared. Another way to get a new sage bush started is to bend a branch and bury part of it in the dirt, leaving the top sticking up out of the dirt. Do not cut from the main plant until roots are established.
When the plant is done flowering it will need trimmed. If it’s a very young plant trim off just the flowers. As you can see in the pictures I have an established, older bush and I trim it way back. As you pull back the branches with flowers on them you will see a bare woody branch (see picture 3 above), I cut all of this off. Other branches (see picture 2 above), will have small starts along the branch, cut this branch anywhere you want to make the plant look shaped. You will notice other fresh/new branches starting in the bush and they do not have any old flowers on them. As you can see, a sage bush grows fast and by the end of summer it will be huge again. I trim a lot off, it looks like half the bush. See flowering sage bush at the beginning of the article and the sage bush at the end of the article,this is a before and after. You can dry some of the sage leaves, for directions check out “drying” under the “herb” section of cooking. I don’t dry or freeze sage since I can pick it throughout the year.
