Nuts for nutans!

I am a big fan of Salvia. It is an enormous genus (900+) species and I'm always finding something new to fall in love with. This week, is it Salvia nutans. I grew it from seed I got from the always great Gardens North this spring. I've been loving the foliage all summer.

Isn't that great? Big, bold, and sexy. I've got three seedlings shoved into this space, and they all seem a little different. I'm particularly fond of the extra large leaves on the one in the back.
I wasn't expecting flowers the first year from seed, but one of them decided to bloom!

How cool is that? Many salvia flower spikes start out hanging down, but I've never grown one before that kept on hanging upside down while flowering! But what excites me most is how the whole plant looks while flowering

I'm sure you can hardly see it in this picture, but the flowers are perched on the end of a stem a good three feet tall, suspended almost magically over the lovely leaves. I'm imagining it in a mass in the front of my boarder, the leaves making a bold statement at ground level, and the flowers dancing in the air, almost like the always wonderful Verbena bonariensis.

Supposed to be hardy to zone 3, I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs next year. I'm expecting a lot more flowers, bigger clumps of those terrific leaves.