Many of my fellow Buffalo gardeners can barely bring themselves to embrace petunias. As for geraniums (pelargoniums)? They’re pretty much off the table.
However, out here in the wider gardening world, I am sure there are some fellow geranium aficionadas, however closeted they may be.
First, it must be admitted that red geraniums do have cliched associations and maybe should be limited to cemeteries and patriotic displays. But wait! What about the balconies of the Plaza Athenee in Paris, each one overflowing with red geraniums? Yes, I mainly know this because of watching Sex and the City. (Once you’ve admitted to liking geraniums, there can be no shame.)
But maybe that’s the only way those red ones could work – totally over-the-top and completely impossible for the average gardener.
In any case, other than roses, I don’t use a lot of red in my garden. Fortunately, geraniums come in many other colors and many interesting forms.
As someone intrigued by old-fashioned annuals, often for their literary associations, I have been buying the intriguing varieties offered by Select Seeds for some years now. This year, it was ‘Grossersorten’, ‘Velma Cox‘, ‘Dolly Varden’ and ’Lord Bute’.
Velma. That’s an interesting name for a plant.
‘Lord Bute’ didn’t make it; it’s easy to accidentally ignore these little seedlings if you can’t plant them right away, as is usually the case.
These are small mail-order plants though, and they’ll take a few weeks to get going. We are fortunate in Western New York to have several greenhouses offering wide assortments of geranium hybrids. I know that the industry has been very busy perfecting these, but I haven’t kept up with it. All I know is that last year I had a couple of pots that bloomed without ceasing and – equally as important – kept fresh green foliage going through October.
So this year, I doubled down and shopped for hot pink and dusty rose geraniums to use in containers throughout sunny spots. So far, I love them. Many of my perennials have yet to bloom and other annuals are still filling out, but these geraniums pop as soon as they’re planted.
While many cultivars are marketed for their scented leaves, I find that most geraniums – at least the zonal varieties I seem to favor – have a great scent.
As I try to require scent, this is another biggie.
There are good reasons plants become so commonly used.
Photo of Plaza Athenee facade by Joe deSousa, Creative Commons.
Since you enjoy the literary associations with plants…did you recall that Mayella Ewell (from To Kill a Mockingbird) grew red geraniums in the yard of her family’s shack? Despite her lowly “white trash” status and her despicable accusations against an innocent Black man, the geraniums reminded the reader that Mayella quietly aspired to something better than her squalid life. I guess she didn’t realize they were cliche! 🙂
Mary Gray, that is just beautiful. I had forgotten this & it just makes me adore Harper Lee even more.
I drool over the various geraniums/pelargoniums on this site. https://geraniaceae.com/pelargoniums/
I don’t care – I love the red ones. They have such wonderful punch and flower endlessly. What joy!
Same here. Who can forget the Flannery O’Connor story that featured them or the fact the their smell is like time travel back to grandma’s and grandpa’s house.
I like all the tried and true annuals. Geraniums, petunias sweet alyssum marigolds, portulaca.. good enough for grandma, good enough for me. So it’s a nostalgia thing. If I could just find the stripped petunias she always had me plant.
My peachy pink geraniums are decades old. I dig them up out of the windowboxes in the front courtyard and replant in pots in my small greenhouse. Heating the greenhouse all winter is probably more expensive than buying new geraniums but these are just unwilling to die. This year they were so big I didn\t put them in the windowboxes. They are in pots. Will see in the fall if I give them another year of babying. The German women would water their geraniums w/ milk. They were the best geraniums ever! I forget.. just put granular fertilizer on them at beginning of the year. They produce great blooms that last weeks!
Elizabeth, thank you for coming to the defense of classic annuals like geraniums and petunias. I’ve never understood why some gardeners sneer at reliable long blooming annuals. They give you pops of color for such a long time. Those annual snobs don’t know what they’re missing
I’d rather be gardening buffaloes!
All the geraniums where I live have one scent: stinky, when the stem breaks. No thanks. Sworn enemy.
Hello, my name is Sally, and I am both a geranium and petunia lover, especially the old fashioned fragrant ones which I can rarely find. Sadly, both these plants suffer and die a cruel death when it gets hot here in Texas, like, now, so I don’t often grow them. No, I take that back, I have a citronella geranium (not one of the floriferous ones) in my back yard that gets full Texas sun all summer and doesn’t seem to care.
Petunias I plant in the fall and they usually last all winter here, then give out in the spring when it gets hot. Like now. The forecast is for highs near or over 100 degrees this coming week. *Sigh*
I love RED geraniums , I plant in my flower boxes on my 70 ft. Front porch. I have some special red that I keep in my ballroom daring the winter.
I adore the annual geraniums. Firstly, gorgeous scent or exciting scent or soothing scent is a way of life for me. Aromatherapy. Listen to Sarah Raven’s podcast, she is so wonderful and loves smells also. Anyhow, one of the best things about annual geraniums is the fact you can save them dried in a paper bag in winter and when right at the time they sense the earth tilt and spring on its way they start to resurrect and grow again. I love doing that. They smell amazing and bloom their heads off most ESPECIALLY in hot hot heat. Perfect for these crazy hot times.
I’m interested to read about geraniums being out of fashion, because where I am (Silicon Valley) and among my friends (all mid 20s to late 30s, but from all over the world) they are very much IN fashion and very cool to grow, especially because here they are perennial and become big fluffy hedges, etc. They bloom like crazy in our climate all through the gloomy months, and hold up in the heat pretty well. The pink varieties are dead common as front yard shrubs, but in a good way.
Petunias are another thing. Some of the newer varieties like “Galaxy” are trendy, and wave petunias in containers are always popular, but most folks go for calibrachoa which for some reason feels more modern.
I love geraniums, although I haven’t always. And while I like most petunias, I can’t seem to keep them alive for long once the summer heat hits.
The old-fashioned annual I’ve always disliked is marigolds. The typical colors aren’t my thing and perhaps it stems from it being the only flower I remember my mom planting while I was growing up.