Naturally Attract Hummingbirds By Growing This Everyday Cooking Herb

There are so many reasons to have a garden. A garden will brighten your landscape with depth and color while it offers fresh-cut flowers for your home. For foodies, a garden can be an easy way to supply your kitchen with edible crops and spices. And for many, it's a place to escape, relieve stress, and surround oneself with little fluttering friends. If it's hummingbirds you're looking to draw closer, we've got a plant for you!

Salvia plants, more commonly known as sage, can be great flowering herbs to place in your garden or in pots. Many provide beautiful flowers in a wide variety of colors, enticing spices for your cooking, and a prolific food source for our pollinating hummingbird friends. One variety in particular that we suggest you try is pineapple sage.

A perennial bush in zones 8-11, this plant will grow in most other areas as an annual. It can reach four to five feet in height and spread. The flowers are a brilliant red tubular, perfect for long hummingbird beaks. It has a long blooming season and provides both edible flowers and leaves.

The leaves offer a sweet pineapple fragrance and flavor that can be used to make a delectable brewed tea or infused into a syrup. They can be added to baked goods like cookies and cakes to add a fruity, floral aesthetic. And you can even sprinkle pineapple sage into savory dishes like baked chicken or grilled kabobs to provide a tropical flavor.

There are over 900 different species of sage in addition to pineapple sage. Placing a variety of these plants around your garden or patio increases your chances of bringing hummingbirds into your space. Choose different types of sage to entice these tiny creatures with blooms that overlap into multiple seasons and offer plenty of room to feed and flit about. While the hummingbirds will be attracted to the colorful flowers, you can flock to a variety of flavors.

Did you know rosemary is a sage plant? And creeping (hanging, trailing) rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus Prostratus Group) is not only highly fragrant and edible, it is what some might call a hummingbird magnet. It is a highly aromatic plant that carries pale blue flowers throughout the spring and summer. Proving rosemary to not only be a great spice on an herbed focaccia or slow-cooked roast, but also an effective way to attract hummingbirds.

Of course, common sage is another plant for you and your hummingbird friends to enjoy. Sage has been used for centuries in herbal medicine. Hummingbirds are attracted to its violet-blue tubular flowers. It blooms from late spring to early summer, and its compact shrub body adds one more visual dimension to your garden space. Try some of your garden sage in this year's Thanksgiving stuffing or make an herbed butter to go on a freshly grilled steak.