Just imagine...it is the first week of October and Salvia greggii 'Cherry Queen' is still flowering. She has been at it since April. A ruby-throated hummingbird, late on his way to the Yucatán, works the spike for a long minute before lifting off toward the next bed. Six months of bloom. Six months of nectar. The plant looks unbothered.

This shouldn't quite work in Carolina. Salvia greggii is autumn sage from the limestone hills of the Texas–Mexican borderlands, drought-built and sun-hungry, suspicious of the kind of summer humidity that sits on you like a wet shirt. Someone had to translate it for the Southeast. The someone was a chemist named Rich Dufresne.

The accidental breeder

Richard F. Dufresne earned a PhD in organic chemistry from Carnegie Mellon in 1972. Three post-doctoral fellowships followed, at Johns Hopkins, Brandeis, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. By 1974 he was between things, living back at his parents' dairy farm in western Massachusetts, and on a quiet day he drove down to Heinz Grotzke's Meadowbrook Herb Garden in Rhode Island. He left with a pineapple sage, Salvia elegans. Red flowers, a scent like crushed fruit, and, as it turned out, a life's work.

A few years later he took a position as a flavor chemist at Lorillard Tobacco in North Carolina, where he stayed for sixteen years. The Salvia work happened beside it, then through it, and eventually in spite of it. He visited the Harvard Herbarium to photograph type specimens. He swapped plants with botanic gardens and nurseries on three continents. By the early 1990s his five-and-a-half acres in southern Guilford County held over two hundred Salvia species, many of them not yet in American cultivation, and his peers had begun calling him the Sultan of Salvia.

Cherry Queen

'Cherry Queen' is one of his deliberate crosses. The mother is Salvia greggii, valued for its bones and its six-month bloom. The father is Salvia blepharophylla, the eyelash-leaved sage from Mexico, which carries the most saturated, signal-bright red in the entire genus but spreads where it isn't wanted and resents cold winters. Dufresne put them together to keep the color and lose the trouble.

The result is a compact subshrub, two to three feet, blooming April through November in our climate, with the heaviest flushes in late spring and again in October. The leaves are narrower and glossier than typical greggii, and a high proportion carry a small pointed tip at the apex. Dufresne identified that pointed leaf as the diagnostic feature for verifying his clone in the trade, which is the kind of thing only a chemist would think to flag. Cuttings only. Seed-grown plants don't come true.

Two women, two coastal states, two chance hybrids

The Sultan title was given to Dufresne by his peers, and the right way to honor that is to acknowledge the network. Two of the salvias on the Woodlanders bench this season come from women whose names belong in any honest history of the genus in America.

Salvia 'Phyllis Fancy' turned up as a chance seedling at the University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum, probable parentage Salvia leucantha × Salvia chiapensis, unconfirmed. It was named for Phyllis Norris, a longtime volunteer at the garden. Foot-long spikes of fuzzy lavender flowers held in inky purple calyces, four to seven feet tall, blooming late summer until frost. In 2013 the Huntington Botanical Gardens hosted the Salvia Summit, the field's first real gathering. Dufresne was there. So was the UC Santa Cruz crowd. So were Tony Avent, Kermit Carter, and most of the people who had spent the previous thirty years moving this genus around the country. Phyllis Fancy is a plant of that gathering and that world.

Salvia 'Anthony Parker' came from closer to home. In 1994 the South Carolina garden designer Frances Parker found a chance seedling in her lawn at 412 East Street in Beaufort and rescued it just ahead of the mower. Salvia leucantha 'Midnight' had crossed with Salvia elegans, the same pineapple sage that pulled Dufresne into salvias twenty years earlier in Rhode Island. She named the seedling for her one-year-old grandson Anthony. From late September until frost, the plant carries foot-long spikes of purple-black flowers held in nearly black calyces. Frances was a longtime consultant to Southern Living and Southern Accents; her own garden in Beaufort was on the city's annual tour for decades. She died in 2022. The plant continues.

Two women, two coastal states, two chance seedlings, and a thread back to Dufresne's pineapple sage running through both of them.

Woodlanders in the network

We don't claim to have been the Sultan's nursery. Plant Delights, Flowers by the Sea, and Big Bloomers held that role more directly than we did. But the catalog has carried twenty-four salvias across its history, from Cherry Queen and Anthony Parker to greggii selections, the southeastern natives, the Mexican mountain species, and the California hybrids. It is a kind of horizontal record of who-traded-with-whom in the late twentieth-century American salvia world. The share-and-trade culture Dufresne practiced is the same culture the nursery has run on for forty-six years, and a portion of his work travels through it.

Salvia koyamae, the shade outlier

Most Dufresne salvias want full sun, sharp drainage, and as much heat as you can give them. Salvia koyamae wants nearly the opposite. It is endemic to Honshu Island in Japan, where it grows along the dry edges of woodland in deep shade, and it carries soft yellow flower spikes 18 to 24 inches above hairy, arrow-shaped leaves from late summer through October. The plant spreads gently, by trailing stems that root where they touch ground, and is hardy through Zones 5 to 9. It tolerates the kind of southeastern heat and humidity that defeats many of its sun-loving cousins.

The garden case for koyamae is that the long-bloom argument isn't a sun-only argument. Koyamae carries the woodland edge into October, after the hostas have finished and the ferns are tired. It also confirms that the genus is wider than the picture most American gardeners hold of it. Dufresne, who collected globally and read herbarium sheets the way other people read newspapers, would have wanted us to know that.

Kin to the salvias

The closing widens once more. Three southeastern plants that share Dufresne's working principles, though only one of them is a Salvia.

Salvia urticifolia is nettleleaf sage, the southeastern native woodland salvia. Its range runs from the Appalachian uplands of Virginia south to Georgia and west to Mississippi, in dry open woods over mafic or calcareous rock. Prussian-blue flower spikes in spring, sometimes a second bloom in late summer. It is the eastern counterpart to koyamae's Pacific shade habit. The genus is global, and the Southeast contributes its own.

Clinopodium coccineum 'Ohoopee Yellow' is scarlet calamint, native to the Coastal Plain from Georgia to the Florida Panhandle. The 'Ohoopee Yellow' selection, named for the Ohoopee River sandhills in eastern Georgia, carries a yellow flower form where the species typically runs scarlet. Long bloom, hummingbird-worked, aromatic when crushed.

Conradina canescens 'Gray Mound' is false rosemary, a Florida-Alabama Coastal Plain endemic restricted to xeric scrub. Silver-gray foliage, small lavender flowers, the kind of plant that thrives on the dry sand bank where most ornamentals quit.

Dufresne's project, the one that ran through every plant he hybridized and every herbarium sheet he photographed, was making Lamiaceae work in the humid American Southeast. That project extends past the genus he loved most. The Clinopodium and the Conradina are kin to his salvias by evolution, by chemistry (the same volatile oils, the same aromatic resins), and by garden behavior. Plant them alongside Cherry Queen and you keep his thread running.

Picture an October bed: Cherry Queen still red at the front, koyamae's yellow carrying the woodland edge under a dogwood, the dry corner held by Conradina's silver. Urticifolia's spring blue still in memory, the calamint humming with a late bumblebee. The Sultan of Salvia would recognize the planting.