Salvia tomentosa

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Salvia tomentosa, photographed by Алексей Ябс — fig. e Алексей Ябс, CC0 1.0 / obs. 96068003

Salvia tomentosa, photographed by Vlad R — fig. f Vlad R, CC0 1.0 / obs. 84131329

Salvia tomentosa, photographed by Максим Шумских — fig. g Максим Шумских, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 83077482

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 10 botanical countries

Native distribution of Salvia tomentosa, 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
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Bulgaria	BUL
Greece	GRC
Krym	KRY
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
East Aegean Is.	EAI	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Transcaucasus	TCS
Türkiye	TUR

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 507 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-4.5 °C	-2.2 °C	0.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.4 °C	24.9 °C	27.3 °C
Annual rainfall	636 mm	889 mm	1,046 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	117 mm	169 mm	199 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 507 research-grade observations of Salvia tomentosa 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 12 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 brachystemon Klokov
Salvia fruticum Vuk.
Salvia grandiflora Etl.
Salvia grandiflora subsp. aegaea (Bornm.) Rech.f.
Salvia grandiflora subsp. rotundifolia (Vis.) Rech.f.
Salvia grandiflora var. aegaea Bornm.
Salvia major Garsault
Salvia nusairiensis Post
Salvia officinalis subsp. major Gams
Salvia officinalis subsp. tomentosa (Mill.) P.Fourn.
Salvia rotundifolia Vis.
Salvia trigonocalyx Woronow

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.
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.