A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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sagebrush
Sagebrush is a gray-green aromatic shrub that covers an enormous area of the intermountain West, standing knee to head high with small three-toothed leaves that stay on through winter. It is not a sage. It is an Artemisia, related to wormwood and tarragon, and the smell after rain is one of the defining sensory facts of the Great Basin.
Etymology
The English name came from the smell, which early travelers matched to culinary sage, and the mistake is now permanent. The genus is named for Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt and of wild country. Big sagebrush is the dominant species, and the Latin means three-toothed, for the leaf tip.
Notes
Sagebrush is the whole habitat rather than a component of it. Sage-grouse eat nothing else in winter and cannot live without it, and pronghorn, pygmy rabbits, and a long list of birds depend on it in the same way. It does not resprout after fire and has to return from seed, which is slow, so the age of a stand is readable in how tall and how gnarled the plants are.