I think they make the names up.

I was in a local garden centre this afternoon. It was small and there was not a lot on sale, but one item did catch my eye. As far as I was concerned it was a Salvia 'Mystic Spires' in its second year, when it gets quite woody, which had been trained into a standard.

I looked at the label, which was in three languages, where it said it was Salvia fazurea. I looked very closely as there is a Salvia azurea - but it clearly wasn't that. To my knowledge there is no such thing, none of my books and the internet have no record of a S. fazurea.

Its hard enough trying to remember genuine names - I wish companies wouldn't invent their own.

 

Mmm could it just have been a typo, maybe?

Is 'Mystic Spires' bred from azurea? I know nurseries sometimes put the parent species name alongside the cultivar name. Which is indeed confusing.

 

like you Peter I could find no reference to Salvia Fazurea.
even Google came up with nothing, it doesn't seem to exist
very strange, maybe you should have a chat with the staff
at the garden centre.

Pete

 

same happens with fish! we bought a beautiful fish about 3 years ago (tropical cichlid), that the fish centre had labelled as a 'Peruvian cichlid', we bought it because it was gorgeous and we hadn't seen one like it before. Further investigation revealed that theres no such thing as a 'Peruvian', it was a cichlid (but we knew that by its shape) but in fact turned out to be a golden Acara.....he's still alive and looking fab, so 'whats in a name'!

 

Peter, don`t blame the garden centre, it is almost certainly the nurserys fault.

 

No Andrew S 'Mystic Spires' is a hybrid of S. farinacea, which you often see on sale, and a rather obscure S. longifolia, which you never see on sale. Its nothing to do with S. azurea.

And Dai - yes you are right. It was nothing to do with the garden centre. And it wasn't a typo - it was a very professional large glossy label.

One thing has passed through my mind. S. 'Mystic Spires' is very easy to propagate but it is covered by Plant Breeders Rights. Perhaps by making it a woody standard and changing the name, someone thinks he can get round the restrictions.

At £16 I decided to give it a miss. Especially as I had taken about 20 cuttings of the same plant last autumn for nothing.

 

From a foreign country I would like to add a comment here.

Peter, I think the plant may have come from a 'foreign country' and that is the name that is used there. I can tell you I have many, many labels / tags / till receipts from here that have the strangest sounding names on them, not what the plant is in my humble opinion. I haven't the time now but I can go through my 'box' of labels and tell you some that would make you laugh your head off. I think it could be a 'local' ie where they came from naming ... believe me on this one ... I can't even find these names on the net ....

 

I had not thought of that Victoria - you could be right. Though I thought that the idea of Latin names was that they were universal.

Come to think of it, some of the official Latin names seem to change pretty often. For instance Dunalia australis became Acnistus australis and is now Iochroma australis, all within a short period of time. :D


Iochroma australis

I couldn't help it. This site http://img.photobucket.com/albums/0903/gordomoose/Australis2.jpg has some brilliant pictures of unusual plants.