Hi Phyl,

I know that some off the salvias have an awful smell to there leaves but the blue bedder is not one off them, I think you can safely say that your Kitty did that to the Blue Bedder.

Cheers Annette

My salvia guaraniticas and its hybrids are the only salvias I have that smell like a litter box. That is usually how I recongnize what it is before it blooms if for some reason I lost the marker or didn't put one in the container.

Penny

Phyl - You can tear a leaf in half and smell it to see if the odor is coming from your plant.
My salvia darcyii has the strongest scent of mine.

I have a cat also, who never poos near my Salvias.

But there are two Salvias whose foliage has the most unpleasant smell, S. confertiflora and S. myriantha! Yet both are stunning plants.
As for beautiful scented Salvias.....dorisiana, raspberry royale, gravida, discolor, ampelophylla, and a few others.

Robin.

Thanks everyone! I did some reading up on Blue Bedder after posting, and found that it is supposedly just an annual here. Oh well...I'll look into the ones you all suggested! :0) Phyl

The one salvia in my garden that has a peculiar fragrance to the leave is canarienss (sp).

As a flavor chemist, the odor in some Salvias like greggii is not due to the same compounds that are in animal urine. Various terpenes in combination can create a wide range of scents.

Oxygenated terpenes are usually more pleasant than unsaturated, oxygen-free ones. The former include menthol, citral, perillyl acetate (Salvia dorisiana), and camphor (many California sages). Caryophyllene, an example of the latter, is found in S. canariensis. I don't know what the terpene hydrocarbons are in Salvia tubiflora (frequently sold as S. oppositiflora), but they remind me of the scent of an old jar of kerosine kept in a damp basement.

The Salvia nemerosa/sylvestris/pratensis sages can have what some people call a cat urine odor. This is true of newly grown robust spring foliage.

I have always enjoyed the aromatic foliage many sages possess, though I recognize that scent preferences vary.

What puzzles me is that no ornamental sage, even the S. nemorosa types that Rich mentions, typically wafts any fragrance at all to my nose - I have to get very close and rub or bruise the leaves. There must be some extremely sensitive noses out there to detect an objectionable fragrance at a distance.

I find the smell of Salvia mexicana to be particularly objectionable. I never smell most salvias unless I break the plant. A few waft fragrance into the air - Salvia clevelandii is one notably fragrant salvia.

A word about olfaction, the sense of smell: anosmas are blindnesses to certain odor types. We are all born with different levels of sensitivity, and exposure to chemicals and diseases and allergies all have an effect on sensitivities. We lose our sense of smell with age, of course.

So some of us can't smell organic acids, or aldehydes, or amines or sulfurous compounds as well as others. One of the reasons some persons can't stand certain scents is because they may have reverse anosmas, which are hypersensitivites to particular classes of chemicals. If these compunds are nasty ones like putrescine or cadaverine, breakdown products of flesh, they will react to the slightest lack of freshness of fish or meat served to us while others might not notice the difference.

The other phenomenon is a temporary anosma, caused by saturation of the receptors in our nose. That is why professional tasters limit their exposure to a wine, not swallowing it, then rinsing their mouth with water and eating a cracker to cleanse their receptors. Even then, they can only do so many samples before taking a break.

The sense of smell is also tied to our deep unconscious and scents can arouse old memories suddenly. Associations of odors to events are hard to break.

There are both strong objective and subjective aspects to reactions to odors, and they are not always easy to separate. A lot of people do not like aroids like skunk cabbage, because the perfume of the flowers contains amines like putrescine or cadaverine, which flies love. Guess what species pollinate aroid flowers.

The scents in Salvias are either antifeedants or associated with non-volatile antifeedants, directed not just towards insects, but towards rabbits and deer. The other association is that the scents attract predators or parasites of Salvia pests.

I just discovered salvias last year, have only one variety planted and hadn't thought to do a search on this forum before now. I'm so glad I did. I have a good sense of smell and it took me a while to realise it was the greggii that was smelling weird when I brushed past while watering. I never noticed anything in the nursery or in the car coming home or even when I first planted them. But now they're bigger they really stink. It's nice to know I'm not alone.

Rich, your comments are really interesting. I'd heard of terpene in timber, apparently some people can't have raw timber in their furniture due to allergy? Didn't realise there are different terpenes and they have a role to play in flowering plants. BTW, do you know of any good websites about the sense of smell? I've been having problems since I washed a new velux blanket recently. While it was in the machine it smelled like resin dental fillings (!) and it seems like I can still sometimes smell it though I don't have the blanket. Bizarre.

Hope nobody minds me bringing up this older thread, I was just so thrilled to find out a bit more about my salvias, which BTW are adored by the bees.