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In May of 2004, Patty Leslie Pasztor and I got permission from land owners to kayak through some limestone canyons on Cibolo Creek to make notes on the unique native vegetation of that area. As we came around a bend, sharp-eyed Patty spotted some rosettes of big red sage (Salvia penstemonoides) growing on a steep cliff. Wow! We had come across an unknown population of big red sage! This is a salvia found in the wild in very few sites in three Hill Country counties and nowhere else on earth.
That discovery on Cibolo Creek spurred me to do some reading about big red sage. I found out that a few botanists collected this salvia in perhaps ten Central Texas counties during the last half of the 1800s and first half of the 1900s. Apparently, it never was an abundant plant, and after about 1950, big red sage was thought to be extinct. During the 1980s, Marshall Enquist “rediscovered” it growing in Bandera County, and Dan Hosage found a large population in Kendall County.
Several reports I read said that the first specimens of Salvia penstemonoides were collected by Ferdinand Lindheimer during June 1849 at or near Comanche Spring(s) in Bexar County (now on Camp Bullis near Leon Springs). Also I read that Salvia pentstemonoides was described and named in Germany in 1848 by Kunth and Bouche from material sent to them by George Engelmann.
These dates didn’t make sense to me. If Lindheimer first collected big red sage in 1849, how could the species have been named the year before? Where did Engelmann get the specimen he sent to Kunth and Bouche before they published on this salvia in 1848? Lindheimer or someone else must have collected big red sage before 1848. When and where?
I was fortunate enough to meet Shannon Smith, Emeritus Director of Horticulture for the Missouri Botanical Garden. I told him my perceived “mystery” about the earliest collection of big red sage. Shannon Smith solicited the help of Douglas Holland, Library Director at Missouri Botanical Garden, and within a day or two my mystery was solved.
Mr. Holland found that the Missouri Botanical Garden herbarium contains a lone specimen of Salvia penstemonoides collected in 1845. He kindly sent me a scan of the dried specimen and the attached note in Lindheimer’s own hand.
Luckily, I have a friend in Fair Oaks Ranch who can read Old German, even that written in the Lindheimer scrawl. Lars Nielsen translated the note to read:
Texas October 1845 Salvia: flowers poppy red (with dark wine-red color) in bunches around riverside bushes on the upper Piedernales (sic). F. Lindheimer
The 1845 collection date is especially interesting because this was during the period Lindheimer frequently corresponded with Engelmann. Did he mention first finding the plant now known as big red sage? Yes, I think he probably did!
In a letter dated November 20, 1845 (published in “A Life Among the Texas Flora”), Lindheimer describes an October expedition he made with Herr von Meusebach to the upper Pedernales River valley. Among the plants he saw was “a delicate Salvia with [illegible word] stemmed leaves and large poinciana-red blossoms.” The plants he shipped to Engelmann from that expedition to the upper Pedernales included the material from which came the type specimen of Salvia penstemonoides.
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