Many herb flowers have been described as small and insignificant. However, delving deep into the pretty bloom of the ‘blue haze’ sage plant shows us the error of this judgement, both for flowers and our fellow humans.
Nature has much to teach us about life, and the humble ‘blue haze’ sage is no exception. Herb flowers are often quite small and, as a result, many have described them as insignificant, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Without their abundant blooms, they’d die out and cease to exist altogether, so these ‘insignificant’ flowers are in fact fundamental to both their survival and our wellbeing when we consider the health benefits of many herbs. How is it that we as humans have learnt to consider small to mean insignificant?
Although the flower of ‘blue haze’ sage, Salvia chamelaeagnea, is only about the length of the nail on your thumb, ‘en masse’ when the bush is in its prime, the blooms look like soft fluffy white clouds in an azure sky. They are one of those unique plants that have true blue flowers, and are such a pleasure to behold. It’s like they’re at their best amongst like-minded friends who understand them and bring out their great qualities.
However, just like the people in our lives, it’s only when we look more deeply that we truly get to know and understand a flower and how it functions in the world. I’m always curious about the inner workings of flowers and love to peer at them through a magnifying glass and in enlarged photographs of single blooms. I discovered that the flowers of sage plants are full of surprises, packing lots of interest and some clever tricks into such a small space.
The bloom of ‘rough blue sage’, as the South Africans call this coastal plant that’s native to their soils, has two petals; a curved blue hooded upper lip and a soft white rounded lower lip that’s made up of four fused petal lobes. The petals emerge from two sepals that are green when the bloom is young and darken to varying shades of burgundy as it matures.
The flower looks like a stunning show piece with not much depth until you look inside. Quietly waiting in the hooded upper lip are two long whitish stamens, fully laden with yellow pollen, hugging the curve of the petal so they are neatly hidden from danger. Snippets of their lower ends can be seen deep in the centre of the bloom in the painting. In order to transfer the pollen from its clandestine hiding place to visiting insects so they can take it to other blooms for fertilization, the flower has developed a clever lever mechanism. When a bee or other insect lands on the lower white petal lobe and moves deep into the heart of the flower to find the sweet nectar reward, it encounters the bottom end of a lever that is attached to the stamen. It must push against this lever to get to the nectary, and this action swings the stamen down out of the upper lip to brush the pollen laden anther onto the back of the insect where it is then transferred to other blooms for fertilization.
The ‘blue haze’ sage bloom is a great metaphor for the unassuming people we know who blend in with the crowd and go unnoticed because they seem small and insignificant, but possess unique and special individual qualities. We only find out about these if we bother to take the action of singling them out and getting to know them bit more deeply. Most of us develop strategies to keep our more vulnerable parts securely hidden, but if others take an interest by asking questions and being curious about who we are and what makes us tick, then we can feel more confident about revealing our innermost selves and being appreciated for who we really are.
So, when you next see fluffy white clouds in a brilliant blue summer sky, remember the beautiful ‘blue haze’ sage flower, and let it be a reminder to take an interest in a person you know who remains unnoticed in the milieu. After all, we all like to feel we are special and important, to someone at least!