Put a smile on your garden

John Hoyland celebrates the renewed popularity of the irrepressibly cheerful pelargonium

NEVER trust a man or a woman who is not passionately devoted to geraniums.’ Garden writer Beverley Nichols’s typically tongue in-cheek, overblown remark hides a truth: how can anyone not be captivated by the exuberance of blowsy red geraniums tumbling down the facades of public houses, adorning terraces in terracotta pots or lined out in spectacular bedding schemes? These are plants that make us happy, bringing a smile to even the most curmudgeonly.

Nichols was writing in 1951, when a generation emerging from a world war welcomed the pizzazz of bright red geraniums. These are flowers that have never really gone out of fashion, but, as with all plants, the extent of their popularity has ebbed and flowed. In recent years, the focus of many gardeners and garden designers has been on more subdued flowers, species plants that have a look of the wild about them, as extravagant, colourful flowers have been overlooked, even dismissed as vulgar; but a plant as easy to grow, long flowering and cheerful as a hybrid geranium will always be a mainstay of summer gardens. And thanks to a group of geranium enthusiasts, the colourful hybrids seem to be enjoying a renaissance.

What Nichols knew as geraniums are, as any botanist or horticulturalist will waste no time in pointing out, not geraniums at all, but pelargoniums. True geraniums are hardy peren- nials, stars of herbaceous border and meadow, but with none of the vibrancy of pelargoniums. As long ago as 1901, The Gardener’s Chronicle was bemoaning the fact that ‘the average gardener speaks of Geraniums when he means Pelargoniums’. This is still true for most of us today, with the names being almost interchangeable: when most of us talk of geraniums we usually mean pelargoniums.