Touch the softly, minutely corduroyed texture of a sage leaf; see the way the distinctive grey-green colour absorbs light; crush it imperceptibly in your fingers, feeling the slight stickiness and releasing the warm, complex aromatics; roll it into aminute cigar and chop it finely, on the diagonal, a satisfying, squeaky, firm resistance to the edge of the knife blade. An essentially haptic herb. Rougher than suede, rather nubbly raw silk, or reassuringly coarse linen. Fine, tiny surface hairs hold glistening water droplets suspended, bound by their own trembling surface tension. Ovoid leaf edges are minutely pinked, whitely delineated, undersides ghostly silver. Sage, dull jade, beach-blurred glass, oblique, opaque, transient, liminaL Salvia officinalis., from the Latin verb salvere ‘to save’, sage is an herb for longevity. Salvia is a burgeoning, behemoth plant genus that has swallowed perovskia (now Salvia yanffit) and just wolfed rosemary — now taxonomically Salvia rosmarinus, though this will take some time to sink into the gardener’s lexicon.
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