Pineapple Sage

Salvia elegans The leaves of this sage have a rich pineapple aroma.

The pineapple sage usually gives in to winter with the first hard frost, sometimes without flowering. This year however, it ignored the early onset of winter, and the coldest period for decades and kept on producing more and more flowers. Now, instead of dead stalks there's a mass of these wonderful flowers.

Today on the radio there have been heavy snow warnings and tsunami warnings. I hope the warnings are just a precaution. A few days ago, in the North Island, hundreds of people were trapped in their cars overnight when the snow was worse than predicted. The tsunami warning last week had people flocking to the beaches hoping to see it.