Year of the Geranium

National Garden Bureau : Year Of…

by Active Articles, ngb.org
November 30th -0001

Introduction and Nomenclature

The bedding plants gardeners plant out in late spring and bring inside in autumn are commonly known as geraniums; but geraniums they are not. They are pelargoniums. True geraniums are the cranesbills, hardy North American and European herbaceous perennials; while pelargoniums are semi-tender or tender plants, mostly from South Africa, that have graced our gardens with their large flowers for decades.

We have to remember that botany wasn’t an exact science in the 17th century when the first geraniums and pelargoniums were introduced. So, based on the shape of their fruit, plant collectors generally lumped both together as “geranium.”

To tackle the complex history of geranium or pelargonium, one has to confront the use of common names versus scientific ones. Scientific names give individuals a common language by which they could communicate with other people, no matter the country they are from or what their mother tongue might be.

In 1753 the famous and influential Swedish botanist, Linnaeus, published his two-volume book called Species Plantarum, in which he attempted to pull together the names and descriptions of all known plants. He placed all geranium and pelargonium plant species in the genus Geranium. A few years later, the French botanist L’Heritier, noting that some geranium species of plants were so distinct that they should be in a different genus, formally transferred them from Geranium to Pelargonium.

However, for reasons unknown, this change in names was not accepted by all botanists and garden writers. A theory exists that H.C. Andrews, a prolific and popular garden writer and illustrator in the early 1800’s, rejected the name Pelargonium in his book on geraniums, thus firmly attaching the name Geranium to all members of the family including the group of widely grown garden plants – namely the zonal or bedding geranium, correctly known today as Pelargonium x hortorum