Lamiaceae
Salvia officinalis
Sage · Common sage · Garden sage
- Part used
- leaf
- Native range
- Mediterranean, chiefly the Balkans
- Morphology
- A grey-green subshrub to about seventy centimetres with soft pebbled oblong leaves and whorls of violet-blue flowers.
What is in it
Evidence
Reasonable small-trial evidence for reducing hot flushes in menopause and for sore throat as a gargle. Some small studies on memory in Alzheimer disease. All small.
Safety
Culinary use is benign. Contains thujone, so high-dose or prolonged use of extracts and the essential oil carries seizure risk. Contraindicated in epilepsy and in pregnancy at medicinal doses; traditionally used to reduce lactation, which matters when breastfeeding.
Interactions: May lower seizure threshold; Additive sedation reported; Possible effect on blood glucose
Regulatory: Permitted as a food and as a listed medicine ingredient; thujone limits apply to extracts.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Among the most highly regarded plants of medieval European medicine, used for almost everything and specifically for the mouth and throat, for sweating and for memory. Sage tea was traded to China at one point in exchange for tea.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Sage is the plant that best shows how far the Galenic reputation of a herb could outrun anything it does. Cur moriatur homo cui salvia crescit in horto — why should a man die in whose garden sage grows — was a genuine medical commonplace, not a joke.
The thujone content is the reason it is filed as caution rather than low. It is the same convulsant found in wormwood, at lower levels, and it does not matter at all in cooking. It matters if someone takes concentrated extract daily for months, which is exactly what a reputation like that encourages.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.