Pelargoniums There’s more to the summer blooms than colour and scent

PELARGONIUMS are among the most popular summer flowers, bringing vivid colour and often wonderful scents to the garden. But pelargoniums offer much more than that, as I discovered on a visit to the Swiss capital, Bern, earlier this month.

The Bernese call the pelargonium Queen of the Balconies and an annual competition is held to find the city’s most attractively pelargonium-crammed balcony.

This mania took a step further this year with Geranium City, a project explaining the secret of success with pelargoniums, describing how to grow and maintain the plants, focusing on the importance of sparse watering. Interestingly, the general advice is not to put plants outside until the temperature is safely above 10C.

Four organisations collaborated to mount an impressively varied festival, with talks, exhibitions and displays taking place throughout the summer.

In April, citizens were invited to have one or two pelargoniums for their own balconies and gardening body Stadtgrun Bern offered to look after any of these tender plants over the coming winter. There are also 100 planters filled with a range of pelargoniums throughout the city, in addition to the customary window boxes.

The city university’s botanic garden not only plays a key educational role in the festival but is also the location of an informative exhibition organised by Dr Stefan Boch. “We want to show people how diverse pelargoniums can be,” he told me. “The botanic garden has 22 pelargonium species and Friburg University have loaned us another 33 species.”

Boch told me the Swiss are just as bad as many Scots at calling pelargoniums geraniums. Comprising around 280 species, pelargoniums are one of seven genera, or groups of species, in the botanical family geraniaceae. But, perhaps confusingly, geraniums – with 430 species – are a different genus within the family.

Nothing was more marked in the exhibition than the diversity of pelargoniums. I could scarcely recognise some of the plants as pelargoniums. P bowkeri has such deeply divided leaves that it could almost be mistaken for dill. And there could be so much foliar interest in a planting comprising species pelargoniums. P radens provides stiff, narrow, branched leaves, while P graveolens has deeply incised ones. You touch its irresistible velvety leaves and release a cloud of rose scent. And then there’s P caffrum, with its five shiny, narrow leaves.

P denticulatum has reduced leaves that look like tamarisk, edged with pointed teeth: I was captivated by the many unusual leaf shapes. But the tiny star-shaped flowers also caught my eye. Pelargoniums come in many more shades and colours than the familiar whites, pinks and reds. I was privileged to see a rare, yellow-flowered pelargonium which hasn’t yet been identified. The blooms of these species pelargoniums are always much smaller than the modern hybrid cultivars, but their charm more than compensates.

Although modern doubles don’t have pollen and therefore can’t attract bees and other insects, all the species and singleflowered ones do. And some of the exhibits made themselves doubly attractive with brightly coloured pollen.

Several of these species are part of the scented pelargonium group and bombard the senses with rose, peppermint, ginger and pineapple. I was also astonished to find the leaves of P acetosum even made the perfect nibble, tasting very like sorrel.

Visit woottensplants.com for a broad selection of species pelargoniums.

PHOTOGRAPH: SHUTTERSTOCK The scope of pelargoniums extends to around 280 species If you don’t have room to overwinter your favourite pelargoniums as large plants, you can take cuttings from them to grow on in small pots. Select a strong, healthy shoot that doesn’t have...