[7] Salvia species include annual, biennial, or perennial herbaceous plants, along with woody subshrubs.

The stamens are reduced to two short structures with anthers two-celled, the upper cell fertile, and the lower imperfect.

[10] Many members of Salvia have trichomes (hairs) growing on the leaves, stems and flowers, which help to reduce water loss in some species.

Sometimes the hairs are glandular and secrete volatile oils that typically give a distinct aroma to the plant.

In older, female stage flowers, the stigma is bent down in a general location that corresponds to where the pollen was deposited on the pollinator's body.

[11] It is believed that the lever mechanism is a key factor in the speciation, adaptive radiation, and diversity of this large genus.

[11] George Bentham was first to give a full monographic account of the genus in 1832–1836, and based his classifications on staminal morphology.

While he was clear about the integrity of the overall family, he was less confident about his organization of Salvia, the largest genus in Labiatae (also called Lamiaceae).

In the end, he felt that the advantage in placing a relatively uniform grouping in one genus was "more than counterbalanced by the necessity of changing more than two hundred names."

[5] Bentham eventually organized Salvia into twelve sections (originally fourteen), based on differences in corolla, calyx, and stamens.

However, the immense diversity in staminal structure, vegetative habit, and floral morphology of the species within Salvia has opened the debate about its infrageneric classifications.

[4] Walker and Sytsma (2007)[16] clarified this parallel evolution in a later paper combining molecular and morphological data to prove three independent lineages of the Salvia lever mechanism, each corresponding to a clade within the genus.

It is surprising to see how similar the staminal lever mechanism structures are between the three lineages, so Salvia proves to be an interesting but excellent example of convergent evolution.

[16] To make Salvia monophyletic would require the inclusion of 15 species from Rosmarinus, Perovskia, Dorystaechas, Meriandra, and Zhumeria genera.