I have been attempting to acquire salvia divinorum for almost 4 years fruitlessly, vendors have even taken my money and kept me waiting months for a refund. Today walking along the street i identified a patch of big healthy salvia divinorum outside someones house. My heart lept seeing the excess of material this individual had so I broke off 2 small growth tips carefully leaving no impactful damage so I can one day have a garden as established. My dilemma is that I am far from home currently and do not know how to preserve these cuttings. I wont be home for 3-5days and want to know how I can preserve until I get back to my rooting hormone,soil,sand and pots. All advice on rooting cuttings is welcome but preservation is most pressing.

Others will know more about this, but as I recall I always put my cuttings in water in a mason jar for a week or so until I saw roots coming out of the bottom of the cut stem. I don't recall if a humidity dome of some sort is suggested or not, but you can spray the leaves to keep them wet if needed.

Thank you for the advice. I am combing the salvia divinorum subforum, I chose to cut off the bottom leaves leaving 6 large leaves on 1 cutting and 4,5leaves on the other 2 each node on each leaf has a branch coming off with small leaves. I placed each in its own cup of water on a windowsil for the evening so they can get indirect light,I will change the water daily. Why do people cut off most of the larger leaves when rooting? I realise its because they require nutrients but large surfaces full of chloroplasts are in my mind rich in nutrients.

I would take off all but about 3-4 leaves, if any are big I'd cut them in half. Then I would wet some paper towels and squeeze out almost all the water you can and wrap the stems in these, then put your cuttings in a clear zip type storage bag, quart or gallon depending on cutting size.
Once you get them home you can put them in a jar of water or some wet perlite or I'm sure other rooting methods work well too. While they are rooting keep a humidity dome on them and give them indirect light, and you can hit them with a little rooting powder too.
Good luck!

I would do as OneSPirit suggest only for transport butnot for 4-5 days in a bag, they may die. just leave like 2 to 4 small top leaves and cut the rest and keep stems with minimum foliage and cut cleanly if you just broke as you said. and leave in water but change it everyday and spray if you can also daily or even few time daily.butyou mayalso cutsome bottles and doa dome and leave the top open ( when cork is). and use thosebottles cut bottom andtop for transport, so you use the wet paper tek to keep base humid allthe way. are you positive its divinorum ? Pretty rare to see a patch outside ones garden but I saw at least one big in some big pot outside, that was mexican housemates in western europe.

These particular plants were coleus. I did acquire a blosser and a strain named ayaulta I have never heard of very shortly after picking these coleus. I got them as rooted plants they lost all but 2 and 3 leaves in the 11 day shipping. I put them in 2.5gal pots with 40%perlite and 60%coco coir watering once every 4 days. In 2 weeks they put out 6 and 3 branches with more to come. I fertilized with a restrained amount of fish/seaweed emulsion(2,3,1) this week. They get 6 hours direct(but through a window) and 6 hours indirect light. I never used a humidity dome the original leaves are shriveling but there are tons of fully acclimated leaves and growth speed is increasing daily. Very optimistic and grateful to finally have the opportunity to care for this incredible plant.