Salvia ‘Hotlips’

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As autumn advances the garden is slipping from summer into winter mode. On the allotment, I’ve taken down all the bean frames and dug out the squash, courgette and sweetcorn plants and even the Cosmos and Dahlia flowers are looking windswept and past their best.

In the big raised bed in our front garden, however, the flowers keep on coming. Particular stars at this time of year are Mexican Fleabane (Erigeron karvinskianus) and Salvia ‘Hotlips’.

Salvia 'Hotlips'

Salvia ‘Hotlips’ in our raised bed.

Salvia ‘Hotlips’ is a woody sage from Mexico. It is usually considered to be a form of Salvia microphylla, Blackcurrant Sage, although it is sometimes (as on the Thompson & Morgan website) classified as a form of Salvia x jamensis (a hybrid between Salvia microphylla and Salvia greggii). I’ll skirt around the naming problem by just using the name Salvia ‘Hotlips’.

Salvia ‘Hotlips’ is very drought tolerant and flowers from early summer until the first hard frosts. It is described as being semi-hardy and will grow happily outdoors here in Norfolk, although it will lose many of its leaves in the winter. It does best in a well-drained soil in a sunny spot and a prune back in spring, to tidy it up and remove twigs that have died off in winter, will keep it happy. In a colder area you can grow it in a pot and take it into an unheated greenhouse for the winter to keep it drier and slightly warmer – it is usually the combination of cold and damp that more tender plants dislike. If you grow it in a pot, repot it once a year and give it a regular feed in the summer months.

The name ‘Hotlips’ comes from the colour of the flowers, which are white with dramatic red lips, the colour of a garish lipstick. Depending on the conditions in which the plant is grown, the flowers can vary between bi-coloured red and white, pure red and pure white.

The flowers are attractive to bees. The nectar is at the bottom of the tube of the flower and a bumblebee can reach it by pushing down on the lower petal and crawling inside the flower. Short-tongued bumblebees often find it easier to “cheat”, by biting a hole in the base of the flower to steal the nectar. This is quite literally robbery: the bee takes the nectar without pollinating the flower. We recently spotted a Buff-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) queen doing this on our plant.

The leaves have a pleasant blackcurrant smell when bruised: Salvia microphylla is sometimes known as Blackcurrant Sage. The flowers taste pleasantly sweet and small numbers can be used to decorate salads and the leaves can be used fresh or dried as a flavouring. A herbal tea can be made from the leaves, called ‘mirto de montes’ (after the name commonly used for the plant in Mexico, meaning ‘myrtle of the mountains’). Medicinally, the leaves can be used to reduce fever.

In recent studies extracts from S. x jamensis have been shown to be cytotoxic (toxic to cells) and phytotoxic, inhibiting the germination of poppy (Papaver rhoeas) and oat (Avena sativa) seeds. The essential oil of the hybrid Salvia x jamensis contains at least 56 different compounds.

Salvia ‘Hotlips’ was first made available to gardeners in 2002 by Stybning Arboretum, now known as San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum. The original plants were brought to the United States from Oaxaca, Mexico, after a housewarming party given by Richard Turner, the editor of Pacific Horticulture Magazine. His Mexican maid, Alta-Gracia, had provided flowers from her garden for the party, including those of this lovely plant.

There are many other varieties of Salvia microphylla and its near relatives, so even if you think that Salvia ‘Hotlips’ is a bit too vulgar for your garden, you can grow one of the others, although the hardiness of different cultivars varies: from 1 to -10 Celcius. I have the purple-flowered Salvia ‘Christine Yeo’ in a pot and also a pink-flowered Salvia microphylla, which I bought from Natural Surroundings many years ago. It did well in pots and even better in the garden. There are also many other species of late summer flowering Salvia to choose from.

New plants of Salvia ‘Hotlips’ and its relatives are easy to raise from cuttings in late summer and early autumn. One of the pink-flowered plants that I raised from cuttings has done very well in Grapes Hill Community Garden, just inside the gate. If you’re unsure whether your particular plant will be hardy where you live, taking cuttings and keeping them frost free over winter is a good insurance policy.

Salvia microphylla

Pink-flowered Salvia microphylla in Grapes Hill Community Garden

Jelly Baby Fungus, Leotia lubrica

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Although a week may be a long time in politics, it can also be a long time in the natural world. This is most apparent in spring or autumn, when seasonal changes can happen very rapidly.

Just a week ago the sun was shining and there were lots of leaves on the trees. Today it is raining (although still very warm for November) and many leaves have fallen from the trees in my part of the world.

This autumn brought out the fungi in Norwich’s Earlham Cemetery, such as the usual range of Waxcaps. We also had another new species for the Cemetery, the Jelly Baby, Leotia lubrica.

Jelly Baby, Leotia lubrica

Jelly Babies, Leotia lubrica

Fungi are classified by the way their spores are dispersed. In the “higher fungi” (sub-kingdom Dikarya), the Basidiomycota (basidiomycetes) have spores perched on top of an inflated, balloon-like structure called a basidium, while the Ascomycota (ascomycetes) squirt their spores out of little pockets known as asci.

Jelly Babies are a type of ascomycete fungi. The fruit bodies of Leotia lubrica grow up to six centimetres (2.4 inches) tall, with a cap up to 1.2 centimetres (half an inch) across. They often grow in groups. The caps are slimy and furrowed or twisted and ours were an olive-green colour, although they can be golden yellow or even orange as well. The stalk is usually mostly hollow, though it can be filled with gel. The English name comes from an obvious resemblance to jelly baby sweets (as James Emerson demonstrates in his blog). Other names include lizard tuft, the ochre jelly club, the slippery cap, the green slime fungus and the gumdrop fungus. The specific name lubrica means slimy.

The species is described as “common but localised” in Britain and Ireland and is also found throughout much of mainland Europe and in North America, as well as in eastern Asia, China, Tibet, New Zealand and Australia. The fungus is usually found in woodland among moss or plant debris, feeding on decaying plant material. Ours were in grass, near a large beech tree but not directly beneath its canopy.

Opinions vary as to whether Jelly Baby fungi are edible. The consensus seems to be that they are bland and uninteresting, although the American mycologist Charles McIlvaine (1840–1909) thought they were good to eat. This is not necessarily a recommendation – he also ate many other species that are considered to be inedible or poisonous, such as The Sickener, Russula emetica. This earned him the nickname of “Ole Ironguts”.

Autumn’s steady march has mostly covered the Earlham Cemetery Jelly Babies in beech leaves and their caps and stalks are rapidly returning to the earth from which they came, spores dispersed, job done. The bulk of Leotia lubrica remains beneath the ground as a mycelium, ready to produce its weird and wonderful fruit bodies in future years.

Thanks to Ian Senior for finding these fungi in the first place and to James Emerson for passing on directions on how to find them.

Bean Anthracnose, Colletotrichum lindemuthianum

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This is a post I would have preferred not to write, for it describes a plant disease I haven’t seen before and, quite frankly, don’t want to see again.

At the end of July we had four days of rather cool, rainy weather and soon after this, on 29th July, I noticed that our neighbour’s runner beans looked sickly. They had reddish-brown marks on the leaves (especially on the veins) and on the stems. The plants hadn’t started to produce bean pods. I searched on the internet and what I found suggested that the plants were infected with Bean Anthracnose. I ruled out Bean Rust (caused by the fungus Uromyces appendiculatus) – this appears as reddish-brown, raised pustules on the bottom of leaves. The article ‘Anthracnose and rust of garden beans‘ on the University of Minnesota Extension website shows the difference.

Bean Anthracnose

Bean Anthracnose on Runner Beans, late July

My neighbour agreed with my diagnosis and immediately destroyed her plants and put them in our council green waste collection, for composting at high temperatures. (Putting diseased beans on a normal garden compost heap won’t destroy the fungus, as the temperature won’t be high enough.)

Another month went by and one of my varieties of Climbing French Bean (‘Blue Lake‘) started to show characteristic spots on its pods, which I removed and destroyed. The disease has now spread to the Climbing French Bean ‘Neckarkoningin’ and the Heritage variety ‘Bird’s Egg’ is slightly affected. Heritage varieties ‘Caroline’s Purple’, ‘Poltetschka’ and ‘Bonne Bouche’ appear to be unaffected. As before, I have removed the affected plants, including shed leaves.

Bean Anthracnose

Bean Anthracnose on Climbing French Beans, October

This is the first time I have seen Bean Anthracnose. The book ‘Pests, Diseases and Disorders of Garden Plants’ (Stefan Buczacki and Keith Harris, Harper Collins, 1998) says that the disease is widespread on dwarf and less severely on runner beans, but usually only apparent in cool, wet summers. However, epidemics of the disease can occur in bean growing areas of the world with frequent rainfall, such as central and western New York State. In Brazil, India, China, Mexico, Myanmar, Canada, Argentina and the United States, anthracnose is considered to be one of the most invasive and destructive bean diseases and can destroy up to 95% of yield.

Bean Anthracnose is transmitted in the seed, a discovery made in 1921 by M. F. Barrus of Cornell University. Recommendations to prevent the spread of the disease include removing dead bean plants and their debris at the end of the growing season, digging over the soil so any residues are buried and following crop rotation so that beans aren’t grown in the same place for at least two years. This is all common sense, but the main inconvenience for me is that I won’t be able to save this year’s dried beans for planting next year.

There are quite a few resistant varieties of bean. The Garden Organic website lists ‘Forum’ (from Thompson & Morgan) and ‘Copper Teepee’ (from Mr Fothergill and Johnsons) and the Crocus website recommends ‘Aramis’.

Hopefully, this year has been a one-off. It is certainly the first time I’ve seen Bean Anthracnose in sixteen years of growing French and Runner Beans on my allotment.