I tell everyone who will listen that hardy geraniums, sometimes known as cranesbills, are the horticultural equivalent of the little black dress or well-tailored black trousers. They go with everything, can be accessorized to suit any style or occasion and are never “wrong” in the garden. If you install a Piet Oudolf-type garden, full of high-flying native grasses and broad swathes of prairie plants like Echinacea, you will still need low growers for places where waist-high plants might be overwhelming. Masses of bigroot geranium—Geranium macrrohizum—will work perfectly in that situation, adding spring blooms, nicely textured foliage and fall color to the mix. At the opposite end of the garden style spectrum, the edges of formal beds are a perfect place for one of the small-flowered types, like ten inch-tall, pink-flowered Geranium sanguineum ‘Elke’.
Breeders have been busy with hardy geraniums and new ones appear every year. Sometimes the changes are simply amplifications of existing characteristics—bigger flowers, longer season of bloom or more robust plants. Occasionally, though, a new trait appears that really shakes things up. If you are thinking of increasing your collection, consider the following, which are either new, newish or have crossed the pond from Europe recently.
‘Havana Blues’—The so-called “blue” cranesbills almost always have at least a tiny bit of purple in their petals, but no matter. ‘Havana Blues’ comes from a Dutch breeder, Marco van Noort. The flowers are large for hardy geraniums, much like those of the familiar blue-flowered retail star, ‘Rozanne’. ‘Havana Blues’ flowers are distinguished by dark purple veins and a white central “eye zone” that brightens up their appearance. The foliage is small and neat, with pointed lobes. Install ‘Havana Blues’ in a sunny site and the plants will grow about eighteen inches tall by twenty four inches wide.
‘Cheryl’s Shadow’—Sometimes Mother Nature does the most marvelous things without the slightest bit of interference from humans. ‘Cheryl’s Shadow’, a pink-flowered hardy geranium with dusky burgundy-brown foliage, is one of those things. Since its first appearance as a spontaneous hybrid in a nursery in Arroyo Grande, California, it has been hugging the ground in the gardens of discerning plant lovers, topping out at only ten inches tall. The small leaves are rounded, like those of last year’s Perennial Plant of the Year, Geranium cantabrigiense ‘Biokovo’. Full sun is the best situation for ‘Cheryl’s Shadow’, which works equally well in-ground or grown in containers.
‘Nimbus’—With its deeply dissected foliage, the blue-purple ‘Nimbus’ hybrid is touted as an improvement on ‘Johnson’s Blue’, a hardy geranium long known for its stellar qualities. Like the majority of commercially available cranesbills, ‘Nimbus’ features simple, five-petaled blooms. Rising to twenty-four inches tall, it lives up to its varietal name, by producing a cloud of flowers starting in mid to late spring. The marketers like to say that it blooms “continuously”. In reality it blooms in flushes throughout the growing season. In between, the foliage provides the attraction. A happy clump in a bright spot will bulk up in a few years, spreading by trailing stems. Bred in England, ‘Nimbus’ has received the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit for overall quality.
Geranium x magnificum ‘Rosemoor’: Anything bearing a name like “magnificum” must live up to that moniker. ‘Rosemoor’, which is named after one of the Royal Horticultural Society’s public gardens, is a gorgeous plant. The flowers, with larger, wider petals than those of many cranesbills, are deep blue-purple, with the purple tone predominating. The veins are even darker and show up well. ‘Rosemoor’, like other magnificums, blooms in early to mid summer and only flowers once a season. This may be a turn-off for some gardeners, but I think the foliage, which often colors in the fall, makes an excellent groundcover. Frankly, the flowers are lovely enough to make them worth the wait every year.
The fabled garden writer Margery Fish championed the hardy geranium cause, going so far as to characterize them as the answer to any garden problem. I wouldn’t say that, but they ease the gardener’s burden by being reasonably impervious to those big garden problems—rabbits, deer and other varmints. Plant them in pots, window boxes, niches in dry-laid stone walls or in beds of any size and style.
Digging Dog Nursery is a good mail order source with a wide selection of hardy geraniums. Find them at P.O. Box 471, Albion, CA 95410, (707) 937-1130, www.diggingdog.com. Free print catalog.