Mother Moonshine's quest to grow a healthy Salvia

I am in need to find a fail safe way to grow healthy, happy beautiful Salvia's.

So the saga begins....

Having a large sprawling garden, I decided to plant salvia's as my starting point. Well not that it is a new garden just that the animals have destroyed my previous attempts over and over again so I gave up. Then one day many moons down the track after a hiatus of thinking I couldn't go through that one more time, I decided to give it another go.

Lot's and lot's and lot's of beautiful Salvia in lot's of colours and varieties. How excited was I when the beds were ready to use - rebuilt, fenced and plant's purchased! Not being satisfied with one of each, two of each had to be bought. Nothing like doing things by halves! Mirrored garden beds and hedges are my way...

So into the ground they went adding more and more as I found them at markets and nurseries. Big ones small ones purple ones red ones.Like a kid in a lollie shop.

Oh so, so excitement. My beautiful Salvia's powering along and the vision being realised. Not only that I had found a plant the animals seemed to dislike! Yay... time to add the complimentary plants and fill in the gaps. Foxglove, Lupins, Snapdragons a Daisy or two with Pelargonium and Penstemon to tie in the flow from the front garden. All looking good, tiny little things they were but massive in my minds eye.

Then disaster struck! My beautiful hard earned Salvia's started turning up their toes...devastation; a knife through the heart, twisting and turning...Here I was thinking a year down the track I'd finally hit on the right plant for my little shack. So many disasters in the past with the all the animals totally destroying them one way or another.

NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOO not my beautiful Salvia.....

I rang my friends with a nursery and the lady at the nursery I purchased from. Yes, I was doing everything right. So why, why, WHY????  Nobody could give me the answer.

Not content with leaving it thus and living previous nightmares, tis time to do some more hardcore research.

Where to start? What to look for? I know, the library and the Internet! Web Search - Google and all it's gammit of options including video's, blogs, books and wonder wheel; the Invisible Web - IncyWincy (example) and DogPile (example1, example2). YouTube, a social networking sites like Facebook; Delicious and a database - Trove being my choice here. Last but not to be ignored the State Library of Tasmania. Close to home and easy to access. Not a bad start me thinks. Gotta find something surely. Onwards and upwards in my quest to grow a healthy Salvia like this

So where did I get such a stunning photo? Like to say it's mine from my garden but for the obvious reason I haven't been able to follow another of my interests - macro flower photography. It's Flickr of course. Loved all the shots so much I started a 

Delicious account to bookmark them to. Oh and of course all the other interesting information to come that I may want to go back to. Started by getting a little side tracked and adding a few individually but in the end I decided why not just add the search link for ALL the beautiful photographs! Did I say side tracked? Hope this doesn't set a precedence I'm supposed to researching how to grow a healthy plant not looking at all the pretty pictures! Well maybe my dreaming will motivate me....

Okay then, here we go. Down to the nitty gritty lets get into it!

Full of anticipation of what I would find I began with the standard Google search and typed in 'Salvia'. Woo hoo!  26,200,000 results. I can see my quest is coming into fruition or is it??? On closer inspection it all, well at least over 90% of the results seem to be on a plant called Salvia Divinorum. 
Three links I bookmarked and subscribed to RSS feed and eventually moved the bookmarks to Delicious.  Salvia Study Group of Victoria, Gardening Australia plant profile: Salvia and Telegraph UK: How to Grow.
The Salvia Study Group of Victoria includes Collections, Buying Newsletter Books and other information, Talks ,Calendar of events and more...Things could be looking up...reference to a manual by Meg Bentley suitable for Southern Hemispherical conditions.  This can be purchased via this group by postal order. Another book they recommend is - New Book Of Salvias: Sages For Every Garden.  

Things looking promising, time to open up a few of these other results. Hang on a minute...this is a drug! Toted to be better than 'mary jane' and LEGAL! This is so not what I'm looking for - not this time any way. Not giving up I tried a few more searches - 'flowering Salvia', 'growing Salvia', 'growing flowering salvia'. Oh crap! This is getting me nowhere.  Salvia Divinorum, Salvia Divinorum and more bloody Salvia Divinorum!!! I do not want to go on a trip! Well maybe in an aeroplane...

With my enthusiasm sinking I waded through a few pages to find anything that might be helpful and continued to sink. Only finding a couple that would be remotely helpful and adding them to my RSS feeds on Google Reader. Clutching at straws maybe? Time to have a break for a while and see what comes in.

'Plan B' Google Reader here I come.

As with doing a Web Search via Google; the majority of hits were on the drug Salvia Divinorum. Maybe I should swap and do my report on this topic! Or am I just HALLUCINATING….

I did find a few Google Reader feeds that related to the flower variety, however the effectiveness for information relating to my topic wasn’t worth the effort to go any further. Each publisher had so many RSS feeds on the page it would have taken a month of Sundays just to wade through them to find the feed I was intrested in!

Certainly not a good way to source information on my topic…at this rate my garden of Salvia’s is all going to be dead before I know it!

I did come across this site however http://flowerinfo.org/  it was a vestibule to photographs and meanings of flowers including Salvia. I liked it so much I subscribed to the feed.

Speaking of RSS Feeds thought I might as well look into a Blog and see if (A) I could find one, but (B) more importantly one with RSS to subscribe too! Took a while but jackpot! I found Mr Brown Thumb all the way over in Chicago. He even had two!!!! One of those showing how Salvia's have been used. Yes I know, I digress again- not quite the 'how do I grow a salvia'. Good to have a look at anyway.

Always a girl for contingency plans lets go to 'Plan C' and see what Wikipedia can do for me. This interface although not huge; gives some interesting information and links for more. Including references to other names to help my search.

I also tried Wikimedia and Wikispecies which defaults to Wikipedia.

Wikimedia has three pages of photographs and files on the topic ‘Salvia’. From here you are able to refine your search. Although the photographs are beautiful, I know what a Salvia looks like and don’t really need the information from this interface for identification (which could take some time as the names come before the photograph) or just to puruse the pretty pictures.

In all interesting but not what I'm after. 

How bout a video. Let's visit YouTube, I hear you can find just about anything here!

ONCE AGAIN Salvia Divinorum takes over.
Flowering Salvia were found at the top of the list this time though. I also found that once a video had been viewed, many more were suggested for viewing. I had a little look see at these three... Growing and Harvesting the Herb, Mr Green Thumb has more than one video on growing flowering Salvia and the Mid South Gardener. This particular video although on what we call 'Sage' was particularly apt as it states it is deer - resistant, just what a girl who lives on a deer farm needs!

I'm nearly done...this hasn't been as easy or as promising as I thought. I decide to give Trove a go. Several databases available to me although not necessarily all appropriate for my quest. 'Books, journals, magazines, articles...', 'Pictures and photos', 'Australian Newspapers 1803-1954', 'Diaries, letters,archives', 'Maps', 'Music, sound and video', 'Archived Websites 1996 - now' and 'About people and organisations'. So many to choose from, all that history to draw on... A broad search over all me thinks! Then I'll narrow it down. Hope one of my three favourite sentimental picks return the most results... 

Diaries - Pictures and photo's - Australian Newspapers...secretly I'm hoping the Faeries have been captured playing in the salvia - Music, sound and video. Wouldn't that be awesome!

I'm devastated...NO FAERIES. This couldn't possibly be true. What sort of database is this? I will not give in - I will alway's believe in Faeries!

Back to the job at hand. Two of my picks returned results, Pictures and photo's and to my delighted suprise Australian Newspapers. Quite a few here actually but I've chosen two for you to have a little look at 1924 and 1932. Yes you guessed it - I got distracted on both of these search results!!! Come on really now tell me who wouldn't!

A change of tact is called for me thinks. How bout looking for a good old fashioned book!

Here I tried a Google Book Search and looked into several vendors as well as the State Library of Tasmania. Low and behold the searches complimented each other, but didn't come up with many books to choose from. The two main ones I came across and can be viewed at the vendor were...

'The New Book of Salvias sages for every garden' by Betsy Clebsch  and 'The gardeners guide to growing Salvias' by John Sutton.

I can't wait til they are waiting at the library for me to pick up!

Well I've done all the searching I'm going to do now. In all nothing new 

 really came up that I didn't already know. As with everything around my little shack, maybe she's trying to tell me something...it's time to stop putting so much energy into her and move on...