Salvia pratensis

The plant is 30 to 60 cm tall, often branched and more or less hairy, with long stalked, heart shaped, wrinkled basal leaves.

The corolla is 2 to 2.5 cm long, violet blue, rarely reddish, with a high helmet shaped upper lip and a three lobed lower lip.

Like all Salvia species it has only two stamens.

Info Flora gives the flowering period of meadow clary in Switzerland as May to August.

The Czech Pladias database records meadow clary as insect pollinated with selfing, with zygomorphic flowers, flowering May to July in Czechia.

In Switzerland it grows in dry meadows and on sunny banks from the colline to the montane and sometimes subalpine belt.

A study in Annals of Botany describes the staminal lever of Salvia pratensis as a pollen dispensing device.

The lower lever arm has a small hole through which a bee pushes its proboscis into the corolla tube, so flower shape confines the posture of nectar probing bees.

When an insect pushes into the tube, the anthers swing down like a barrier and deposit a portion of pollen on its back, as Potsdam Botanic Garden explains.

Potsdam Botanic Garden describes the nectar as plentiful but reachable only by pushing the proboscis into the flower tube.

The same university page calls meadow clary a food plant for honeybees and colony forming bumblebees.

Near Wuerzburg, Germany, meadow clary flowers produced on average 2120 micrograms of sugar in 24 hours and were visited by Bombus terrestris workers.