I noticed that the geraniums down by the garbage bin are flowering. Not the nicest spot in the garden for them to grow as they are growing in relatively poor soil (it's quite rocky a few inches down) and quite shady, being a north facing border, but they are just so undemanding. They throw out pretty leaves and then flowers and when that is done you can just cut the leaves off and a new, fresh, lot of leaves will shoot up. A friend gave me my geraniums. I won't say cuttings - she grabbed them by the stalks and dragged them out of her garden and shoved them in a plastic bag! When I got home, some had roots on and others did not and I didn't know which were blue and which were pink so I planted what I had all together. The pink ones with the smaller flowers have, funnily enough, been more successful. That might be because they were lucky enough to still have roots on. However, I noticed today that the blue geranium is poking through the pink ones and they look so lovely together. If you have a poor area which needs a bit of ground coverage you might try geraniums (I'm not talking about
pelargoniums which are a different thing altogether and so often called geraniums).
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| Geraniums - pink and blue |
By the way, did you know you can grow pelargoniums as climbers? I didn't until I visited the conservatory at
Temple Newsam and saw climbing pelargoniums there. I was amazed. If you look closely at the photo at that link, you will see that the pelargoniums that are climbing are not the trailing, ivy-leafed pelargoniums (as you might imagine they would be) but just the ordinary ones that I plant in my containers or borders.