A dense, rounded Texas ranger with deep green leaves and waves of lavender-blue flowers in summer and fall. It has the toughness of the other desert sages with a fuller, greener look than the silver-leaf types.
Living with it in the Phoenix Valley
Watering
Follow the shrub schedule in our Landscape Care guide while it establishes. Like other desert sages, it should be kept lean after that. Too much water leads to soft, leggy growth, fewer flowers and root rot in heavy soil.
Pruning
Leave it in its natural rounded form. Repeated shearing into balls or boxes cuts off the flowers and leaves a hard, twiggy shell. If it needs to be smaller, thin or cut back individual branches in late winter or spring.
Bloom
Like other Texas rangers, it flowers in response to humidity and soil moisture, so the biggest shows usually follow monsoon storms. Bloom comes in flushes rather than all at once.
How our designers use it
Informal hedge or screen
Planted in a row and left unsheared, it forms a soft evergreen screen along walls and property lines.
Green contrast
Its deep green leaves balance gray-leaf shrubs and silver cactus, so a desert planting doesn’t read as all one color.
Pollinator planting
The flowers draw bees, butterflies and hummingbirds through the summer.
Good to know
Around the pool
No thorns, and it stays tidy. Bees visit while it is in bloom, so we keep it a little back from where people sit.
