Salvia elegans (pineapple sage)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Salvia elegans, photographed by Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata — fig. a Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-02-13 / obs. 179444022

Salvia elegans, photographed by Robert Martin — fig. b Robert Martin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173856935

Salvia elegans, photographed by Dante S. Figueroa — fig. c Dante S. Figueroa, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 136069687

Salvia elegans, photographed by Steve Kerr — fig. d Steve Kerr, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 66901144

Salvia elegans, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. e Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 29362046

Salvia elegans, photographed by Oscar Alejandro Morales Juárez — fig. f Oscar Alejandro Morales Juárez, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 27418336

Salvia elegans, photographed by Jenny Christianson — fig. g Jenny Christianson, CC0 1.0 / obs. 19526995

Salvia elegans, photographed by Alexis López Hernández — fig. h Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 492880

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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Salvia elegans, 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 Central	MXC	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Gulf	MXG
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Mexico Southwest	MXS

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 892 in flower of 915 examined

97%

99%

100%

98%

97%

82%

100%

92%

100%

99%

95%

Proportion of examined Salvia elegans in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	112	115	97%	93% to 99%
Feb	149	151	99%	95% to 100%
Mar	116	116	100%	97% to 100%
Apr	93	95	98%	93% to 99%
May	61	63	97%	89% to 99%
Jun	28	29	97%	83% to 99%
Jul	14	17	82%	59% to 94%
Aug	32	32	100%	89% to 100%
Sep	36	39	92%	80% to 97%
Oct	67	67	100%	95% to 100%
Nov	76	77	99%	93% to 100%
Dec	108	114	95%	89% to 98%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Salvia elegans 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. 892 of 915 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 8 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 camertoni Regel
Salvia elegans var. sonorensis Fernald
Salvia incarnata Cav.
Salvia longiflora Sessé & Moc.
Salvia microcalyx Scheele
Salvia microculis Poir.
Salvia punicea M.Martens & Galeotti
Salvia rutilans Carrière

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.