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| Hummingbird Sage (Salvia spathacea) |
I first encountered hummingbird sage in Santa Barbara. As a wildflower, its natural range does not include the Bay Area. However, it's also a popular horticultural plant that happens to do pretty well in people's gardens here. The plant I photographed here appears to have escaped the confines of its nearby garden, but I suspect the gardener (a neighbor) actually seeded the soil beneath a couple of street trees.
I have yet to catch a hummingbird feeding on them as I walk by, but it seems like just the kind of thing they would like.
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| Note the resinous sepals and bracts. This can be a very sticky plant to handle. |
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| Street Garden |
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| Stairway Garden |
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| Garden Snail |
I wondered what explains the dotted trail and found some serious (and not-so-serious) guesses here at New Scientist.
The scientific name was Helix aspersa when I was in a first-year zoology class decades ago. We were taught that Latin names are used because Latin is a "dead language." Word meanings don't change the way they do in living languages. However, I do think it's kind of funny that the common name for garden snails remains the same after all these years, while the scientific name now is Cornu aspersum. Taxonomy never sleeps.
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