Salvia fruticosaMill.

Greek oregano

WFO wfo-0000301042 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Salvia fruticosa, photographed by Quentin Groom
fig. a Quentin Groom, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-14 / obs. 197461939

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
04817295
Filed as
Salvia fruticosa Mill.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
M. Reiff 1998-04
Origin
IL
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 12 botanical countries

Regions where Salvia fruticosa is native: Libya, Cyprus, East Aegean Is., Lebanon-Syria, Palestine, Türkiye, Albania, Greece, Italy, Kriti, Sicilia, Türkiye-in-Europe LibyaCyprusEast Aegean Is.Lebanon-SyriaPalestineTürkiyeAlbaniaGreeceItalyKritiSiciliaTürkiye-in-Europe
Native distribution of Salvia fruticosa, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
Sicilia SIC
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
Cyprus CYP ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is. EAI
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Palestine PAL
Türkiye TUR
Libya LBY AFRICA

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 92 in flower of 118 examined

Proportion of examined Salvia fruticosa in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 2 too few examined
Feb 8 12 67% 39% to 86%
Mar 28 32 88% 72% to 95%
Apr 36 37 97% 86% to 100%
May 17 19 89% 69% to 97%
Jun 3 4 too few examined
Jul 0 2 too few examined
Aug 0 1 too few examined
Sep 0 3 too few examined
Oct 0 3 too few examined
Nov 0 2 too few examined
Dec 0 1 too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Salvia fruticosa 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. 92 of 118 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 782 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 3.8 °C 8.9 °C 11.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 23.9 °C 28.2 °C 32.1 °C
Annual rainfall 440 mm 739 mm 1,149 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 2 mm 6 mm 48 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 782 research-grade observations of Salvia fruticosa that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 21 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 baccifera Etl.
  • Salvia clusii Jacq.
  • Salvia cypria Unger & Kotschy
  • Salvia fruticosa subsp. cypria (Unger & Kotschy) Holmboe
  • Salvia fruticosa subsp. thomasii (Lacaita) Brullo, Guglielmo, Pavone & Terrasi
  • Salvia incarnata Etl.
  • Salvia libanotica Boiss. & Gaill.
  • Salvia lobryana Azn.
  • Salvia marrubioides Vahl
  • Salvia ovata F.Dietr.
  • Salvia sipylea Lam.
  • Salvia subtriloba Schrank
  • Salvia sypilea Lam.
  • Salvia thomasii Lacaita
  • Salvia triloba L.f.
  • Salvia triloba subsp. calpeana (Dautez & Debeaux) P.Silva
  • Salvia triloba subsp. cypria (Unger & Kotschy) Holmboe
  • Salvia triloba subsp. libanotica (Boiss. & Gaill.) Holmboe
  • Salvia triloba var. calpeana Dautez & Debeaux
  • Salvia triloba var. subhastata H.Lindb.
  • Sclarea triloba (L.f.) Raf.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.