Plant craziness has attacked me again.\u00a0 As always, it came on suddenly, as I sat down after a long day\u2019s work and paged through one of my favorite English gardening magazines.\u00a0 These publications are full of what my husband called \u201cplant pornography\u201d\u2014gorgeous photos of alluring specimens, dripping with dew and ready to jump right off the page.\u00a0 The tight close-ups grab your eyes and don\u2019t let go.\u00a0 By the time you finally get the strength to turn the page, you are crazed with desire for the rose or delphinium or clematis.\u00a0 Distance and price are immaterial.\u00a0 The only thing that matters is getting to the computer to find the closest vendor.<\/p>\n
This time my plant crush is Geranium asphodeloides, or the asphodel geranium, a hardy geranium with five elongated pinkish petals veined in purple.\u00a0 Those petals were spread over a full page of the magazine and served as introduction to an article on an English geranium breeder.\u00a0 The breeder is interesting, but Geranium asphodeloides is stunning.<\/p>\n
The geranium isn\u2019t even listed in my ancient edition of the gardener\u2019s bible, Hortus Third.<\/em>\u00a0 I turned to the internet and found it at geraniaceae.com, a plant vendor specializing in the genus.\u00a0 The site also specializes in good plant descriptions and I found that my latest love hails from \u201csouthern Europe and Sicily\u201d.\u00a0 It is a low grower, rising 12 to 18 inches high, and 15 to 24 inches wide.\u00a0\u00a0 The site does not show its \u201cclumps of mid-green, shallowly rounded leaves\u201d, but I can imagine them.\u00a0 Best of all, the plant is relatively cheap and reputedly seeds easily, meaning that if I buy one or two, I will have many more within a few years.<\/p>\n Geranium asphodeloides probably got its name from the flowers\u2019 resemblance to those of plants of the Asphodelus genus.\u00a0 The elongated petals are asphodel-like<\/p>\n I have a well-documented soft spot for hardy geraniums, those ground-covering relatives of the common window box geranium, which is known to the horticulturally-inclined as Pelargonium x hortorum.\u00a0 Hardy geraniums come in shades ranging from purest white to darkest maroon, with lots of pinks, roses and purples in between.\u00a0 Some of them have attractive veination, like the asphodel geranium.<\/p>\n Most hardy geranium flowers bear five petals apiece, except for the double varieties that sport a larger petal count and a fluffier appearance.\u00a0 Depending on species and variety, they grow in sun or light shade in all kinds of soil.\u00a0 The leaves are generally rounded or palmate and often deeply dissected.\u00a0 Sometimes, as with varieties of Geranium phaeum, the leaves are variegated with dark maroon splotches.<\/p>\n Vanessa Cook, the English breeder and vendor profiled in the article, stocks about 90 different varieties of hardy geraniums, but that is only a fraction of the total number of species and varieties growing wild and in gardens around the world.\u00a0 Most grow fairly low and make excellent ground covers, rock garden specimens and border fillers.\u00a0 Some bloom profusely in the spring, but others, like the celebrated blue-flowered \u2018Rozanne\u2019, will rebloom later in the season.\u00a0 The leaves are generally attractive throughout the season.\u00a0 You can grow hardy geraniums in pots and sometimes under trees.\u00a0 Once established, most take care of themselves.<\/p>\n Geranium asphodeloides is my latest plant crush, but I have gone geranium crazy before.\u00a0 The last time, the object of my desire was Geranium renardii or Renard\u2019s geranium.\u00a0 It has beautiful crimped leaves and white petals veined in purple.\u00a0 My husband and I went on a plant adventure trip to Connecticut to buy two specimens.\u00a0 He got a rum raisin ice cream cone for his trouble and I got two great geraniums for my garden.\u00a0 Not only did no one else in town have them, but probably only a few gardeners in my state could boast of growing Geranium renardii.<\/p>\n This time I don\u2019t have to go to Connecticut.\u00a0 All I have to do is summon geraniaceae.com on my computer, order a few and wait impatiently for the plant shipping season to commence.<\/p>\n I will appreciate Geranium asphodeloides as long as I grow it, but my initial ardor will eventually soften to abiding admiration.\u00a0 It may not even take that long.\u00a0 After all, the third page of the article on geraniums features a glorious white Geranium phaeum \u2018Stillingfleet Ghost\u2019.\u00a0 I may have to have that one too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Plant craziness has attacked me again.\u00a0 As always, it came on suddenly, as I sat down after a long day\u2019s work and paged through one of my favorite English gardening magazines.\u00a0 These publications are full of what my husband called \u201cplant pornography\u201d\u2014gorgeous photos of alluring specimens, dripping with dew and ready to jump right off … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3],"tags":[175,2058,2059,2057,1227,174,590],"class_list":["post-2665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-cranesbills","tag-flowering-perennnials","tag-geraniaceae","tag-geranium-asphodeloides","tag-ground-covers","tag-hardy-geraniums","tag-rock-garden-plants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2666,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2665\/revisions\/2666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}