Description
Botanical Name: Teucrium canadense
Common Name: Wood Sage, American Germander, Canada Germander
Description: Here’s another very pretty, long blooming, pollinator attracting, native perennial for your garden.
Wood Sage likes growing in loam, organic material (muck), or sand. Isn’t particular about pH levels. It prefers the open sunny edges of wetlands and is most often encountered at the upper edges of marshes and wet prairies. Will also grow in those part sun to part shade areas. Pollinators include bumblebees, honey bees, digger bees, cuckoo bees, and megachilid bees. Nectar plant for butterflies and hummingbird moths. Natural habitats are swamps, floodplains, marshes, wet meadows, wet pastures, margins of lakes and ponds, cypress domes, ditches, disturbed sites. It flowers spring through fall, but may bloom year-round during mild winters. Wood sage’s flowers are whitish-pink to lavender, tubular and distinctly two-lipped. The flowers attract a variety of native long-tongued insects that use the flower’s lower lip as a landing pad. Birds find the plant’s seeds appealing. Mature size is 2-3′ tall. Wood sage is suitable for moist to wet wildflower gardens, especially naturalistic landscapes as it spreads via underground rhizomes and can form large colonies. Add this one to your rain garden list! Does reseed itself. Isn’t drought tolerant.
Has ornamental and medicinal value.
Tolerant of inundation with brackish water. Some tolerance to salty wind but not direct salt spray.
Plant Lore: The genus name Teucrium refers to the mythological King Teucer of Troy who is said to have been the first to use a Teucrium species medicinally. The earliest known use of the plant was by Native Americans who ground the leaves to prepare a herbal tea for use as a diuretic and to promote sweating. The green parts of the plant are also used as an antiseptic wound dressing and made into a tincture for gargling.
This plant in 1-gallon containers is 8-12″ tall.
Hardiness Zones 8 – 10 / East Gulf Coastal Plain Ecoregion
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