Gardener's Guide to Growing Hardy Geraniums

Gradually, inevitably, geraniums have been emerging from the shadows into the spotlight in recent years. At one time they had a very low profile, and were considered only as fillers, or bread-and-butter plants. One of their qualities is being good-natured, and they seemed quite content with a supporting role, but then it became increasingly apparent that they were rising stars with great potential. New species were introduced, new hybrids created, and at last they began to get the media coverage which sets the fashion in plants, as in so many other things - although in this case it is a fashion which is far from fleeting. Their new prominence only served to highlight their many excellent garden qualities, their versatility and their durability. Most good gardens today feature an increasing variety of geraniums, used a number of different ways. On an everyday level they will put up with being stuck in anywhere to fill a gap and still come up smiling, with a long display of flowers and an even more extended show of attractive foliage. But they deserve much better than that. A little attention paid to their cultural preferences, and the very many ways in which they can be shown to advantage in the garden, will be greatly rewarded. You can use them in large groups of the same variety, or mix and match them in more individual and subtle associations with other plants of all kinds. Their array of flower colour and diversity of leaf shape, in both cases running the gamut from delicate to robust, offers tremendous scope. There are geraniums in a series of heights from 4 in (10cm) to 48 inches (122 cm), so they will fit into any situation, from an alpine trough to a wild woodland setting. Their ease of cultivation and maintenance makes them ideal for today's gardens, where the main requirement is for a pleasing, long-term effect which does not need a great deal of upkeep. At the same time, among the wide choice of geraniums introduced, there are also some unusual varieties of limited availability which have great appeal for the collector. There is, of course, the little matter of the confusion between geraniums and pelargoniums. Some people prefer to treat it as a joke, on the lines of, 'When is a geranium not a geranium?' 'When it's a pelargonium', shrugging it off as a merry mix-up. The maddening muddle goes back to the eighteenth century, when Linnaeus (Carl von Linne), the father of modern taxonomy, introduced the binomial system for the naming of plants. Each plant was given two Latin names, a generic name referring to its family, and a specific name referring to itself. In 1738 it had been proposed that pelargoniums and geraniums should be distinct groups, but for some reason Linnaeus would not accept this, and lumped them together under the general heading of 'Geraniums'. This name soon became one which was commonly supposed to refer only to pelargoniums, which increased in popularity when a number of new species were introduced from South Africa and became the mainstay of Victorian and Edwardian bedding-out schemes. At that time very few of the true geraniums were available, or widely grown, while the usurping pelargoniums went from strength to strength. Today the vast majority of people still refer to pelargoniums as 'geraniums'. As Hugh Johnson says in The Principles of Gardening (1979), 'It is one of the rare cases in horticulture where democracy has successfully routed botany'. Books with 'Geranium' in their titles are usually found to refer only to pelargoniums. At least two specialist 'geranium' nurseries in the UK deal exclusively in pelargoniums.Bath, Trevor is the author of 'Gardener's Guide to Growing Hardy Geraniums', published 2004 under ISBN 9780881926705 and ISBN 0881926701.