page_title: Salvia divinorum
section_title: Botany
hierarchical_section_title: Salvia divinorum / Botany
caption_attribution_description: English: Salvia divinorum flower detail
context_page_description: Salvia divinorum is a plant species with transient psychoactive properties when its leaves are consumed by chewing, smoking or as a tea. The leaves contain opioid-like compounds that induce hallucinations. Because the plant has not been well-studied in high-quality clinical research, little is known about its toxicology, adverse effects, or safety over long-term consumption.
  Its native habitat is cloud forest in the isolated Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, Mexico, where it grows in shady, moist locations. The plant grows to over a meter high, has hollow square stems like others in the mint family Lamiaceae, large leaves, and occasional white flowers with violet calyxes. Botanists have not determined whether Salvia divinorum is a cultigen or a hybrid because native plants reproduce vegetatively and rarely produce viable seed.
  Mazatec shamans have a long and continuous tradition of religious use of Salvia divinorum to facilitate visionary states of consciousness during spiritual healing sessions.
  Its chief active psychoactive constituent is a structurally unique diterpenoid called salvinorin A, a potent κ-opioid agonist.
context_section_description: Salvia divinorum has large green ovate (often also dentate) leaves, with a yellow undertone that reach 10 to 30 cm (4 to 12 in) long. The leaves have no hairs on either surface, and little or no petiole. The plant grows to well over 1 metre (3 ft) in height, on hollow square stems which tend to break or trail on the ground, with the plant rooting quite readily at the nodes and internodes.
  The flowers, which bloom only rarely, grow in whorls on a 30-centimetre (12 in) inflorescence, with about six flowers to each whorl. The 3-centimetre (1.2 in) flowers are white, curved and covered with hairs, and held in a small violet calyx that is covered in hairs and glands. When it does bloom in its native habitat, it does so from September to May.
  Early authors erred in describing the flowers as having blue corollas, based on Epling and Játiva's description. The first plant material they received was dried, so they based the flower color on an erroneous description by Hofmann and Wasson, who didn't realize that their "blue flowers, crowned with a white dome" were in fact violet calyces with unopened white corollas.
caption: Flower detail, showing violet calyx and white corolla
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