purple sage

American  

noun

1. a plant, Salvia leucophylla, of the mint family, native to California, having silvery leaves and purple spikes of flowers.

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Example Sentences

There are plugs of grasses and gallon pots of white sage, purple sage, California buckwheat, long-stem buckwheat, deerweed, narrow leaf milkweed and coyote bush.

From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 26, 2026

Imbued with a heady pedigree and a peripatetic upbringing, Mr. Nichols evolved instinctively from a cosmopolitan New Yorker and world traveler to a Western writer of the purple sage.

From New York Times • Dec. 2, 2023

If Mom likes to walk, you can hike the 2.2-mile pathway around the reservoir together and check out the dazzling array of poppies, purple sage and artemisia that lines the California native garden.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 18, 2022

He does not know the wide-open spaces or the purple sage, but the narrow, closed-in spaces of saloons, and the windswept, nighttime highway can give him a similar sense of freedom.

From Time Magazine Archive

Venters saw with a rider's keen vision ten, fifteen, twenty miles of clear purple sage.

From Riders of the Purple Sage by Grey, Zane