Geraniums, Family and Adolescent Aversions

I have never been a big fan of the Common Geranium (Pelargonium x hortus).

It isn’t their fault. It’s me.

My grandmother was the daughter of a dockworker and spent her early years in Liverpool, England before coming to New York at 14, lying about her age and getting a job as a chambermaid at the Garden City Hotel. She quickly rose through the ranks and by age 18 she was the head housekeeper of both the Garden City Hotel and the Fort William Henry Hotel in Lake George, NY. She spent her time divided between the two depending on the season. In those days, the head housekeeper presided over the dining room as if she were the hostess of a grand estate so the dockworker’s daughter fudged her place of birth (she said Aintree, home of the Grand National) and developed certain ideas about what was what. One of the things she decided—and passed on to my mother and hence to me—was that geraniums were low class, common plants. Evidently, in 1890s Liverpool the only people who grew geraniums were the fish mongers’ wives.

My family history predisposes me to dislike geraniums.

My first ‘professional’ experience with geraniums doesn’t help matters either. Cropsey’s, the farm stand where I worked as a teenager, had just the beginnings of a garden center in the early ’70s. What displays we had were made up of found materials and leftover farm carts. The geraniums were displayed on an old high wheeled cart the bed of which was just high enough to make it impossible for me to comfortably reach the plants to  clean and deadhead them. As the new kid, I was always stuck with the job of cleaning and deadheading and for some reason there wasn’t anything I could stand on to make the job easier.

Unfortunate adolescent experiences prejudiced me against geraniums.

So, it is obvious that we can blame my mother and and my erstwhile boss, Gary, for my disdain of the poor Pelargonium.

Now, of course comes the part where I triumph over this devastating handicap by dint of my own herculean efforts and go on to live forever in geranium scented bliss. Well, sort of. The actual story is that in the mid-’90s I went to work in a garden center that was the retail outlet for a very large wholesale grower. Every summer morning I would trundle over to the greenhouses and load a cart with my pick of four acres of some of the best plant material I’ve ever seen. It is difficult to avoid thinking, “Oh, pretty.” from time to time when you have the choice of every  color and leaf combination in the geranium universe but I persisted in insisting that I hated the things.

That was over ten years ago. In the interim, I worked on an herb farm that had a wide variety of scented geraniums (P.graveolens and P. crispum) and I did kind of start to like those—especially one called “French Lace” that has crinkly, white edged leaves. And I started working at The Landscape in Newburgh (“the store”) which is where I still help out when they need me.

This year an old white enamelware pail that had been sitting in a corner of the cellar full of sand since we bought the house twenty-odd years ago was now, for some reason, in my way. I took it outside and dumped it thinking I could put it too good use only to find that the bottom had rusted through in several places. I set it aside near the cellar door. Before long, every time I passed it, sitting there in the weeds with its pristine sides and wood & wire bale handle, the thought “Red Geraniums”. Maybe it was the voice of my grandmother trying to make amends for so blighting my life but it got me to buy a couple of four inch pots of “Patriot Red” the next time I went to the the store to water.

Late in the summer, when everything was winding down and the annuals were starting to look dumpster-ripe, I  stopped by the store (mostly just to visit) and while there I picked up a large white geranium to admire how healthy it looked and Nancy said, “Take it.” Nancy hates white flowers and knows I love them. I didn’t have any plan for a large white geranium but when someone gives you a plant, you don’t turn it down.

Poor Poor Pitiful Pelargoniums

So, here we are at the end of he season with two geraniums that haven’t gotten the best of treatment throughout the growing season. i got over my reluctance to owning geraniums but it seems that my aversion to caring for them is holding its own. We haven’t had a hard frost yet so the geraniums are still out there the worse for wear but still managing to put out an occasional flower. I don’t have the heart to just let them die off when the dahlias, figs and cannas all have their places in the cellar so I am going to try the bare-root hanging upside-down overwintering method I’ve been hearing about since my days back with Gary at Cropsey’s. I’ll be following the guidance of Lee Ann Stark’s article “Winter Storage of Geraniums” at Dave’s Garden. This has always struck me as the craziest overwintering method ever but everyone who has done it swears by it. I’d be curious to see what other plants could be preserved in this manner and if I have any success with the geraniums, I’ll be looking around for other tender perennials to try it out on next year.