Do you have some other forms of Salvia splendens close to
you vanhouttei? If not it should come true.
Art

I wintersowed several kinds of salvia, all in containers.

On a visit to Longwood Gardens quite a while ago, I got a plant called Salvia vanhouttei, from which most of the forms going around have been derived. It had burgundy flowers, but many of the seedlings came up with orange flowers, and with a form more like true splendens.

Some of these plants made their way to Barb Smith of Pendleton, SC, and she came up with a number of color forms, named Paul and Lewis after her children. Paul was deep purple, and there were forms from Paul with orange, light orange, lavender, and deep plum flowers, amongst others. Lewis is an orange form.

I have no idea how the variegated form, Dancing Flames, came about.

Wendy's Wish from Australia is a popular patented plant and is evidently a cross of S. buchananii with a splendens, probably a vanhouttei form. Black Knight is evidently a guaranitica x splendens (or vanhouttei) cross.

For the second edition of Betsy Clebsch's (New) Book of Salvias, Dr. Ian Hedge of the RBG Edinburgh was of the opinion that vanhouttei was an early or intermediate attempt at breeding the current S. splendens of the trade

Most of the currently available forms give mostly orange seedlings.