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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
entry from field notes dated January 19, 2023, taken along steep, one-lane gravel road ascending forested, northeast-facing mountain slope, elevation ±2,380m (7600 ft); bedrock of Cretaceous limestone; on the south side of Pinal de Amoles, Querétaro state, MÉXICO, (N21.134°, W99.629°)
SALVIA cf. STACHYOIDES
The above lanky, sprawling herb grew from atop a small roadcut beside a narrow trail, in a place often shaded by tall pines. Up close, the plant displayed a stem square in cross-section, leaves growing opposite one another on the stem, and an inflorescence in which the small flowers gathered in whorls along the rachis called verticillasters. It was a member of the big Mint Family, the Lamiaceae:
Up closer, the corollas displayed a special kind of bilateral symmetry, with a scoop-like upper lobe heavily invested with glandular hairs:
It was yet another species of sage, genus Salvia, and often sages are hard to identify. For, estimates of the number of Salvia species worldwide range from 700 to nearly 3000. Jesús G. González-Gallegos and others, in their 2020 work entitled "Richness and distribution of Salvia subg. Calosphace (Lamiaceaea)," tell us that just in the subgenus Calosphace, which is home to a bit more than half the world's Salvia species, about 580 species are recognized, with 295 of those occurring in Mexico. Needing all the details we could get for identification, here's a typical leaf:
I can't explain the tiny brown bumps scattered across the leaves' surfaces; maybe scale insects or insect eggs. The leaf's undersurface and the stem were soft-hairy:
With regard to identifying Salvia species, especially here in the Mexican highlands, once a researcher pays close attention, it appears that Salvia is undergoing a mind-boggling explosion of speciation. Among documented species are some collected only in certain small areas, maybe a range of mountains or a valley. On the Internet I can find many species similar to our plant, but none entirely fitting the descriptions or locations where the species are found.
Our plant's spiky inflorescence of very small, fuzzy flowers is similar to those of the garden Lavender, genus Lavandula, which makes it appear to belong to the "section" of the genus Salvia known as the Lavanduloidaeae.
That's helpful to take into account because Itzi Fragosa-Martinez and others working in Lavanduloidaeae in 2015 published a study entitled "Salvia semiscaposa (Lamiaceae) a new species from Nanchititla, Mexico." Nanchititla is a highland spot in the state of Mexico maybe 120 kms WSW of Mexico City and about 220 kms SSW of here in Pinal de Amoles. In that work, an identification key is provided to eight species in the section Lavanduloideae in the Nanchititla area. None of those species quite match our plant. Noting that our flowers' pedicels tilt downwards instead of standing erect or spreading, and that our plant sprawls horizontally -- is "procumbent" -- and that the stems' upper leaves are evenly developed along the stem, not clustered at the stem base, our plant "keys out" to Salvia heterofolia, found only in the Nanchititla area. However, that species' leaves are unlike our plant's.
There's a species in section Lavanduloideae more generally distributed in upland central Mexico, including in our area, which looks a good bit like our plants, and that's Salvia stacyoides. However, Salvia stacyoides doesn't appear to sprawl like our plant. Still, keeping in mind that often numerous species end up lumped into a larger species, regarded as mere local expressions of natural variations of a more broadly distributed species, I'm filing our plant under the name SALVIA cf. STACHYOIDES. The "cf." means that I'm unsure about the ID, so maybe someone else will "confirm" it, or not.