I live an a apartment  in Long Beach CA and my mother just got a house of her own.
Today she told me I can have a spot in her yard to grown anything I want.
So what was the fist thing I planet?

Yes you got it right "White Sage".

I love the scent of sage. Hell I even love the name SAGE.
If you lookiup  sage on the internet it can teach you a lot about sage.

The use of sage is for healing. The smoke is used to bless, cleanse and heal the person or object being smudged. Sage is used to "wash off" the outside world when one enters ceremony or other sacred space. Objects are likewise washed off with sage medicine smoke to rid them of unwanted influences.The plants that are called sage can come from very different families of plants.
True sages are in the genus of Salvia; this includes Salvia Officinalis (garden sage) and Salvia Apiana (White Sage), also called California White Sage and Sacred Sage. Many of the herbs called sage come from a completely different family of plants, the Asteracea family. This family brings us the genus of Artemisia from which come New Mexico Sage (Artemisia tridentada), and the sage from the Dakotas (Artemisia ludoviciana), also called Grey sage, Prairie sage, Dakota sage, Lakota Sage and mistakenly sometimes called White sage. All of these sages (Salvia and Artemisia) are used for healing and cleansing. More can be learned from the book Sacred Sage, How It Heals