Woodland sage, 9th of September 2017.

Watercolor, 10 x 18 cm.

I sketched woodland sage quickly and standing, a couple of days ago in my mother's garden (above; click on the image to show it in larger resolution). The representation is thus not botanically accurate, it shows a "posture" of the plant, rather than its botanical specificities, such as details of the flowers or leaves. The pink color of some flowers is also poorly represented - it is brownish-orange in my painting. After the sketching, I photographed the bush (below) because neither my mom nor I were sure about the identity of the plant I sketched.

A later investigation and suggestions of my FB friends revealed that it is a "wild" sage. But, there are huge number of sage species so that I already gave up the idea of classifying it, until I found the botanical illustration of Salvia sylvestris made by a certain H. P. la Chapelle which was published in Dutch Flora Batava in year 1898. It is pretty obvious to me that this is the plant I sketched.

Salvia sylvestris is also known as Salvia nemorosa - these are synonyms - it is known in English speaking countries as woodland sage or Balkan clary. It grows in a wide area of central Europe and western Asia. Linnaeus gave it the name nemorosa in 1762, which means znači of wood (lat. nemus - wood, grove; nemoris - of wood; nemorosus - wooded, shady).

Searching the botanical illustrations, I found a great collection of illustrations which were donated to Wikimedia by Naturalis Biodiversity Center and which are in public domain. Here is the link: >> Naturalis on Wikimedia. There are, among other things, scans of 892 illustrations of Japanese flora and fauna (1823 - 1829), 1178 botanical illustrations, some of which are of great quality, and 165 excellent illustrations of Indian birds. The scans have a relatively large resolution (typically ~ 1400 x 1800). Among these illustrations, there is also the one which caught my attention, in original (!) which enabled me to identify its author (H. P. la Chapelle, signing like HLC). I increased the contrast of the scan (below) to increase the clarity of the illustration.

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Last updated on 9th of September 2017.