By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on October 15, 2004
Big red sage (Salvia penstemonoides) is now a fairly common garden plant, but it is scarce in the wild. Presently it is known from only three Texas counties and nowhere else in the world. There are a few small populations of big red sage in the Lost Maples area of Bandera County, a couple of populations on private land in Real County, and two known populations in Kendall County.
During the past 155 years, this salvia also was collected in five to seven other Central Texas counties. However, from the 1940s until the 1980s it was thought to be extinct.
Kendall County’s colony of big red sage on Frederick Creek has been monitored since the early 1990s by the wildlife division of Texas Parks and Wildlife, In addition, Mary Kennedy and her students at TMI, in cooperation with TP&W, have collected population data on these big red sages for the past eight years. With the data they gathered, Kennedy’s students won Science Fair awards at the local and state level and also presented their research at a national Junior Academy of Science meeting. Their work showed a peak and then decline in this big red sage population.
The Frederick Creek site once had 200 plants or more, but heavy floods in the last few years buried most of the big red sage under sediment. Now this salvia population consists of a few rosettes without bloom stalks. These survivors are being shaded by a dense growth of ligustrum, which is rapidly replacing native vegetation at this site. Within the monitored area there have been no blooming plants for the past two years.
It is my guess that nearly all big red sage in gardens around the US are descendants of plants from the Frederick Creek locality at Boerne. I make this assumption because Dan Hosage, who discovered this stand of big red sage 18 years ago, collected seed here and introduce Salvia penstemonoides into his nursery trade.
The ease of access to this site and the size of the population made the Frederick Creek locality the likely source of seed when botanical gardens and nurserymen started growing big red sage.
The other Kendall County site was discovered only this year by Patty Leslie Pastor. This newly found population is the largest and most robust known to exist today. The stands of big red sage in Real and Bandera Counties reportedly have no more than 10 or 12 plants at each site. The new Kendall County site has an estimated 150 to 200 plants. There probably are still-undiscovered stands of big red sage hidden away on private land in Kendall County. If found, these populations should be disturbed as little as possible.
Big red sage is not protected by law on either the state or federal level. Presently this plant is included in Category V (Watch List) of the Texas Organization for Endangered Species. This category designates Salvia penstemonoides as a species that lacks legal protection, but “has either low population numbers or restricted range in Texas and that is not declining or being restricted in its range, but requires attention to ensure the species does not become endangered or threatened.”
It seems to me big red sage should be at least in Category IV (Texas Threatened). This category includes “any species that lacks legal protection and that is likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future.” Wild populations of big red sage would seem to fall into this category.
The definition of Category V (the present designation for big red sage) includes the sentence,
“These species need more re-search.” Now in the planning stage is a long-term joint project of the Cibolo Nature Center and the Boerne chapter of NPSOT for studying what ecological factors lead to healthy, viable populations of Salvia penstemonoides.
Big Red Sage, Part 3 next month.
