Salvia leucantha / Mexican Bush Sage

I think Mexican Bush Sage has to be my all time favorite plant. Much as I love everything fragrant, this is just such a stunner that it beats out everything else. I'd seen it interplanted with tagetes lemmonii and that's a winner for sure, then today I noticed how the pots of leucantha sitting next to the pennisetum 'rubrum' are so wonderful that I think I'll interplant the leucanta, the tagetes and the pennisetum also. Leucantha planted with leonotis leonurus / Lion's Tail? WOW. I just don't think it can be overused.My problem is that I love the possible combinations so much that I'm afraid I may take up an awful lot of property playing with just the leucanthas. With red salvias? I thought it would also look good with pink roses, but in looking at the salvia 'Anthony Parker', think that would be a better choice because it's more blue that the eye-popping purple.
The median strip on our road going into town here is planted with the all purple leucanthas, the white and purple leucanthas,roses and this time of year they're huge mounds of color. I could rave more about them, but I'm going back out to move pots of them around and see where I might want to use them in combinations I haven't thought of yet.
The other plant that I think I'm going to be real crazy about is lepechinia hastata interplanted with the native salvias which are growing around the matilijas. Those poor people who aren't gardeners! What do they do? Lol....
Sherry

I like the leucantha too, but I haven't had super good luck with it. I had some at my old house and it died its first winter and never came back, then I planted some in my new garden last fall and it also died over the winter. Most of my other salvias do fine, so I don't know if this one is just extra picky about drainage or something (although I see other people's plants around here come back for them, so maybe it's just me!) I love the Lepechinia's too--one you might want to check out is L. fragrans, particularly the 'El Tigre' cultivar, it's very nice too. Salvia canariensis is another one of my favorites for a nice showy plant (but beware...the gophers like this one, they ate 2 of mine earlier this year and I spent almost the entire summer trying to find someone who carried them so that I could replace them!)

I don't know what it is about salvias, I truly don't. My leucanthas have been here 10 years, they spread and spread. They're soo tough. Salvias that thrive for other people die on me. It's awful. I have a salvia canariensis that's been in the ground here for 10 years also, gophers have never bothered it. I think these plants have some kind of unknown language they can send for miles and miles back and forth between each other to say, "hey, what can we do to play with their minds?"
I've been doing some checking on the other lepechinias and think I may order seeds this week if I find any. Maybe Hudson, will check him later today.
Also to add, I think my other favorite, really useable plant is the pennisetum 'rubrum'. I can put it where it gets little water and it's wispy. If I put it where it gets a lot of water, it gets huge, like pampas grass, I don't, however, like having to cut it back when it gets large and thick. Real pain.

I really think the plants do play with our minds--I have a number of things that should do really well here and do for everyone else (tibouchina and lantana to name two of them) but they just don't like me, they die back every winter and take forever to come back. And then I have things like Jasminum sambac that shouldn't even be hardy here but came back from our week of 20 degree temperatures. How I can have better luck with that than with Lantana is still a mystery to me!

Yeah,'cause you can't hardly kill lantana. It runs wild here. And I've tried sambac in the past and had no luck.

Lantana runs wild here too, just not in my yard! I think part of my problem may be that I've never had an old, well established garden--everything's always been newly planted. I started mostly from scratch at my old house (except for some trees & shrubs), then moved when most of my garden was 1-2 yrs old, and last year I started from scratch here too. I bet some things after they've been in the ground a few years will start to be more resilient and come back faster, so I'm not giving up yet! I have some lantana and some Salvia leucantha sitting on my deck waiting to be planted now!