Salvia ballotiflora (shrubby blue sage)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Salvia ballotiflora, photographed by Michelle W. （鍾偉瑋） — fig. a Michelle W. （鍾偉瑋）, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-03 / obs. 204327281

Salvia ballotiflora, photographed by Center for Urban Ecology — fig. b Center for Urban Ecology, CC0 1.0 / obs. 197059843

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Salvia ballotiflora, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Mexico Northeast	MXE	NORTHERN AMERICA
Texas	TEX

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 683 in flower of 764 examined

84%

86%

98%

86%

89%

87%

85%

75%

98%

93%

90%

92%

Proportion of examined Salvia ballotiflora in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	21	25	84%	65% to 94%
Feb	12	14	86%	60% to 96%
Mar	40	41	98%	87% to 100%
Apr	142	165	86%	80% to 91%
May	83	93	89%	81% to 94%
Jun	34	39	87%	73% to 94%
Jul	41	48	85%	73% to 93%
Aug	24	32	75%	58% to 87%
Sep	65	66	98%	92% to 100%
Oct	93	100	93%	86% to 97%
Nov	73	81	90%	82% to 95%
Dec	55	60	92%	82% to 96%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Salvia ballotiflora observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 683 of 764 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 2 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Salvia ballotiflora var. eulaliae Fernald
Salvia laxa Benth.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.