Salvia divinorum is a perennial sage in the mint family (Lamiaceae) that grows wild only in the Sierra Mazateca, a mountain range in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The Mazatec people who live there use its leaves in divination rituals. Outside that region it is known as a psychoactive plant because its leaves contain salvinorin A.
Family. Lamiaceae, the mint family, which also holds culinary sage, rosemary and basil.
What the plant looks like
The plant grows to more than a metre tall. It has hollow, square stems, as most mints do, and large green leaves with toothed edges set in opposite pairs (DEA Diversion Control, 2025).
The flowers are the clearest identification mark. Each corolla is pure white, held in a calyx that is violet blue, on a flowering stem of the same colour. The botanist Carl Epling, who named the species, first described the flowers as blue because he only saw dried material; the white corollas turn brown when they dry (Reisfield, 1993).
Calyx. The cup of sepals at the base of a flower. In S. divinorum it is violet; the petals are white.
Where it grows
In the wild the plant is found along stream banks in the Sierra Mazateca, in shaded and humid spots. Populations spread vegetatively, from their stems, and each stand appears to be a single clone. Flowering is sporadic, between October and June, and is most visible in patches where sunlight breaks through the canopy (Reisfield, 1993).
The Sierra Mazateca rises to roughly 1,200 to 2,500 metres, but Reisfield also found stands at 300 to 400 metres near the Alemán reservoir. Reisfield described its distribution as anthropogenic: shaped by people. Many separate populations may well derive from a single source.
Seeds, cuttings and hybrids
Salvia divinorum almost never forms viable seed. In Reisfield's fieldwork no fully developed seed had ever been collected from a Mexican plant. In greenhouse trials, hand pollination between plants gave 24 mature seeds from a possible 760, about 3%. Self pollination gave 11 from a possible 432 (Reisfield, 1993).
Because of this low fertility, botanists long suspected that the plant was a hybrid between two other sages. A DNA study tested that idea and found no evidence for it. The closest known relative turned out to be Salvia venulosa, a rare species from Colombia (Jenks et al., 2011).
Search tip. "Salvia seeds" for sale are usually other species, such as white sage (S. apiana) or garden sage (S. officinalis). They are not S. divinorum.
In practice, every Salvia divinorum plant in cultivation comes from a cutting. Germination and pollination in the wild are still poorly understood, according to a review of fifty years of research (Casselman et al., 2014).
How science found it
Mazatec ritual specialists used the plant long before outsiders described it. In 1962 the ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson and the chemist Albert Hofmann travelled through the Sierra Mazateca looking for it. They never found it growing wild themselves; Mazatec people brought them flowering branches. Those specimens reached Epling in California, who described the species with Carlos Játiva in the same year (Reisfield, 1993; Casselman et al., 2014). In 1963 Epling planted cuttings of the original collection at the botanical garden of the University of California, Los Angeles.
How the Mazatec use it
The Mazatec call the plant ska María Pastora. Valdés and colleagues, who worked with a Mazatec practitioner, describe its use for divination and compare it with the other visionary plants of the region: a morning glory (Rivea corymbosa) and psilocybin mushrooms (Valdés et al., 1983).
Traditionally the fresh leaves are chewed and held in the mouth, or crushed so that their juice can be drunk. This matters for how the plant works: salvinorin A is broken down in the stomach and gut, so the effect comes from what is absorbed through the lining of the mouth before swallowing (Siebert, 1994). Use outside Oaxaca follows a different pattern. In an online survey of 500 users, 92.6% usually smoked or vaporised a salvia product (Baggott et al., 2010), and researchers who analysed salvia videos on YouTube describe this as a distinct, new way of using the plant (Casselman and Heinrich, 2011).
Quid. A wad of leaves kept in the cheek and chewed slowly. The traditional way of taking the fresh leaf.
Growing it
Cultivation is possible but the plant is not easy to source: it is only propagated from cuttings, and in many countries owning the living plant is itself an offence. Germany, for example, lists the plant and its parts in its narcotics law. Check the legal status where you live before you look for one.
Where it is legal to keep, its natural habitat is the best guide: shade, constant humidity and moist soil along running water. We have not found controlled studies on cultivating it, so we give no growing recipe here.
Where to read on
- Salvinorin A: the substance in the leaves and how it differs from classic psychedelics.
- Leaves and extracts: what "10x" or "20x" on a label means.
- Effects and duration: what happens after chewing or smoking.