As a member of the mint family, Russian sage is armed against brutal environmental conditions because its leaves are rich in aromatic oils. Like its cousins the sages and salvias, these chemically volatile oils are a front line defense against all would-be predators: insects, birds, even deer will leave this plant alone.

During the early 1800’s a Russian Renaissance in botany and natural history produced a new wave of scientific exploration. Grigorij Silych Karelin was both a diplomat and a naturalist with a gift for botany. He traveled throughout the Crimean, Caspian, Pakistani and Tibetan regions for many years collecting specimens. He first classified, then named the plant perovskia atriplicifolia, for his patron, General V. A. Perovski.

Karelin’s plant hunting expeditions were the stuff of legend. He is famous for having trained his convoy of Cossack bodyguards to become expert collectors.

He’s possibly more famous for how he trained them to stop drinking the spirits he carried for scientific purposes: he mixed them with a lethal poison and demonstrated the results by poisoning a dog in front of them.

Russian sage also illustrates that one gardener’s weed is another gardener’s treasure. A few members of the mint family have a bit of a reputation as thugs in the garden, but it’s nothing that some careful breeding can’t correct. A plant’s bad qualities (rampant root systems and manic self-seeding) can even be transformed into its strengths. Take goldenrod for example; Canadian gardeners rip it out with a passion, while German gardeners revere it as a great autumn ornamental and are breeding dozens of new varieties.

No wonder it won the Olympic gold medal of garden plants, the 1995 Perennial Plant Association’s Plant of the Year Award; the tough, adaptable Russian sage is more than just low maintenance, it seems to actually thrive on neglect.