A passion for Pelargoniums

LOOKING back to my childhood in the 1960’s, windowsills were alive with red, pink or lemon-scented pelargoniums and if you didn’t have any, cuttings would soon be passed on. I was always on the lookout for unusual varieties and remember cadging cuttings of the old dark-leaved miniature ‘Red Black Vesuvius’ from a plant-loving aunt. Their popularity dated from the Victorians who, at least in London, could buy them from the handcarts of door-to-door pot plant hawkers known as ‘botany bens’.

We knew them as ‘geraniums’, a confusion that arose when Carl Linnaeus originally lumped pelargoniums in with hardy border geraniums because they both produced seed capsules resembling cranesbills. They were separated in 1789 and although both are in the plant