Fourteen years ago, I fell in love with eight common red geraniums, a gift I planted in a window box. I thought they were the only kind there were—lots of people still do.
My friends taught me better. In the fall of my first geranium growing year, I propagated my eight plants and succeeded in raising 140 cuttings that winter in my small greenhouse.
At this point, a friend felt I was in a rut. So he gave me a pink geranium and a white geranium. That did it. We now have over 1000 varieties.
My geranium collection has convinced me that I specialize in the world’s most versatile flowering plant, a natural for the living garden and the living home.
Give it sun, and it will bloom all year. Except for sensitivity to coal gas, it is as happy indoors as out. It is a good bedding plant, a good pot plant, and an addition to the border or the window sill.
Have you ever seen dwarf geraniums? They do not exceed a height of 8” inches, maybe as tiny as 3” inches, and are adorable on a kitchen window sill where they will cheer the cook.
Geraniums In Spring
Come spring, and she can transplant them to the rock garden, where they will sparkle with color all through the hot summer months. Or, since they are short and compact, she will find they make an awesome border for her front walk or the edge of her vegetable garden.
Then there are the sweet-scented geraniums, like rose, peppermint, nutmeg, lemon, lime, and ginger, all real herbs.
If you dry the leaves, grind them and sew them into little silk sacks, they will perfume linen closets or bureau drawers. The smell will charm you but is anathema to moths who won’t go near it.
All the scented varieties have delicate, pretty leaves in many colors. Bring them indoors in the autumn and introduce your guests to them—and the sweet perfumes they release.
Swiss balconies have long dripped with ivy geraniums, till recently little known in this country. It is their nature to the trail, but they are amenable to training on trellises, opening new vistas of uses for the versatile geranium.
Ivy Geraniums
Ivy geraniums grow small and large, range through 50 varieties from white to royal purple, and have shiny green leaves and elegant flowers. The rosebud types are barely distinguishable from tiny tea roses as they unfold their petals.
They hang but will blanket a trellis with bloom. A friend of mine has one that covers a 5’ foot-high, 5’ foot-wide trellis with profuse white flowers almost all year. Try espaliering them on frames in a picture window, moving them to your terrace as the weather warms.
Or, if you prefer the smaller types, save the front edge of a window box for them, where they will contrast nicely with the upright forms. Or set them on the top of a stone wall.
Nor are these all. Some varieties are notable for their colored leaves, and like their sisters, they supply foliage for the house in winter and grace notes for the garden in summer.
The dividends are many, the demands few: a minimum of four hours of sun a day for all types, a good soaking once a week, a good, rather heavy garden soil reinforced with compost, a monthly feeding of 0-20-20, plus pinching out of fast-growing branches at the tips.
44659 by Milton H. Arndt