Bog sage is a beauty, luring birds and bees

A great purple hairstreak, one of the most beautiful butterflies in the U.S., created a stir as he feasted on the nectar-rich sky-blue flowers of the bog sage. This sage, the tallest plant in our new pollinator gardens at the Coastal Georgia Botanical Gardens, is bringing in visitors, those that fly and those that drive.

Every day I watch visitors with cameras, many with tripods, setting up near these two gardens. It truly seems the hosts of bees, wasps, butterflies, hummingbirds and dragonflies are providing buzzing safari-like moments.

So many dragonflies are in these gardens it helps to have a pocket guide for identification. But their predators are there, too. The ones most talked about are the Mississippi kites that come swooping down at warp speed only to leave dragonfly wings fluttering in the air.

The garden becomes pure enjoyment when you choose to grow a great pollinator plant like the bog sage.

The bog sage, or Salvia uliginosa, is native to the South American countries of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina but will look at home in your garden. It is a cold-hardy perennial in zones 6-10, which covers all of North Carolina.

One of the taller salvias, the bog sage can reach 6 to 7 feet and produces rare, sky-blue flowers. Though it is in full bloom now, it will keep up this flower production until frost. Despite the name that makes it sound like it will grow in water, you should plant it in well-drained, fertile soil.

While preparing the soil, incorporate 2 pounds of a slow-release, 12-6-6 fertilizer per 100 square feet of planting area. Space plants 20 to 42 inches apart and place them in the back of the border. Our pollinator beds are actually islands, so we have bog sage in the middle and then layered shorter plants outward.

The bog sage is as much at home in an old-fashioned cottage garden in front of a white picket fence draped with David Austin English roses, as it is in the backyard wildlife habitat. We have ours partnered with Blue Fortune agastache, Silky Gold asclepias, fall-blooming senna and splashes of chartreuse from Wasabi coleus and Gold Mound duranta.