Geraniums steal the show

Peter Dowdall reports on a budding success story and how plant gifts make gardens more interesting

I received a truly special gift several years ago from a fellow gardener. I say it was truly special for it has survived in my garden and not just flowered this year but has actually stolen the show.

The gift in question was a Geranium palmatum and it was given to me by Gertie and Maurice O’Donoghue of the fabulous Dromboy garden in Carrignavar, Co Cork. The couple generously opened their garden recently in aid of Marymount Hospice.

I cannot tell you how many times I have tried to grow this plant in various different places in various different gardens in which I have lived over the years only for it to curl up and die each time. Every time I have admired it in a garden where it has made itself at home, I have had to wince when the owner would tell me that it thrives on neglect and sets seed freely, cringing in envy as much as embarrassment for not being able to get it through even one growing season.

Success story

It is with great delight that I can report that this time I have been met with unbridled success. It must be three years since I planted it and, while it survived for the last two years, I must say, that I wasn’t holding out much hope. In fact, I had more or less forgotten about it, consigning it to the ‘another one tried and failed’ department.

Imagine my delight when I noticed a couple of months ago that it was not just surviving but was positively brimming with life, sending forth new leaves and stems with gay abandon. Then I saw what looked like, but could it be, could I allow myself to imagine, a flower bud!

Now, at the end of June my Geranium palmatum has given me two months of sheer joy and pleasure. It has reached about 1.5metres in height and has created an inflorescent pink haze of about two metres in diameter. Not bad for what was a meek-looking rosette of hardly a few leaves, this time last year. It seems Carrignavar plants are made of sturdy stuff.

Living entity

A garden is truly a living entity and to refer to plants as living gifts couldn’t be more accurate. Every time I admire a gifted plant, I always think of those that gave it to me. The bunch of flowers or bottle of wine would be long since composted or imbibed.

Geranium palmatum pictured at the garden of Mary Byrne in Glounthaune which will be open on Sunday, July 14, in aid of Enable Ireland. Picture: John Allen

I often refer to ‘Cousin May’s rose’ which was given to me as a very small child, when I was about four or five. Cousin May gave it to me and it grew in my parents’ garden for years afterwards. It most likely still does grow there. Cousin May was in her 70s or 80s when she gave it to me, but to a four-year-old child she might as well have been 120. I tended to and admired that peace rose for about 40 years and every time I saw it I thought of May and it unfailingly brought a smile to my face. Both my parents and Cousin May are now enjoying the gardens in the sky, all having since departed, but even now as I think of that rose bush I find myself smiling.

Garden gifts

My own garden is filled with gifts and reminders of the people who gave them to me and it makes the garden so much more meaningful. I know that the Geranium plamatum can be a short-lived perennial so I may not get to enjoy that particular specimen for the next 40 years but I am hopeful, now that it is happy in its new home, that it may set seed and I can enjoy future generations. The bees have been loving it too, adding an extra dimension to the ‘living entity’. And what good is a plant or a garden if it’s not providing food for these creatures to whom we owe so much?

In the limelight

This geranium, which is quite different to either those pelargoniums which we refer to as bedding geraniums, is native to Madeira and produces erect stems up to well above a metre in height with masses of bright pink flowers. Mine is growing in a rich, well-mulched soil facing nearly due east, sheltered from the wind. I had planted it near a lupin, ‘Manhattan Lights’, a new favourite, thinking that, should the geranium thrive, the colours would complement each other as the lupin produces bicolour blooms of near-purple and yellow. I’m sure they would have looked well together had my geranium not decided to really hog the limelight.