The Victorians and Edwardians had a passion for rock or alpine gardens, creating extensive pseudo-alpine landscapes from actual rocks, artificial rocks and various forms of debris, up to and including broken dishes.\u00a0 Fashionable gardeners filled the cracks and crevices of these layouts with alpine plants newly discovered by plant hunters in various mountainous regions of the world.\u00a0 Alpine displays were a big part of the first Chelsea Flower Show in 1913 and an alpine layout received the only Gold Medal at the event.<\/p>\n
The rock garden passion may have ebbed gradually during the twentieth century, but it never died, even in the banal far reaches of western New York State where I grew up.\u00a0 For twenty years my father dreamed amorphous dreams of having his own rock garden.\u00a0 The dream probably originated with the collection of large rocks that came with my childhood home.\u00a0 We lived in that house for twenty years and the rocks gathered moss in a corner of the back yard for the entire time.\u00a0 Their nearest neighbor, a rhubarb plant of ever-increasing size, was the only witness to their unrealized potential. \u00a0The main impediment to rock garden realization was not an absence of vision, but an abundance of infants. My father was, after all, a busy obstetrician during the second half of the Baby Boom.\u00a0 He and I never talked about rock gardens after the house was sold.\u00a0 I think it was the view of the rock pile that kept the dream alive.<\/p>\n
That early exposure to underutilized rocks and rhubarb made me wary of both rock gardens and rhubarb husbandry. \u00a0I like big romantic rose bushes laden with many-petaled blooms, not tiny little specimen plants that are best viewed with a magnifier.\u00a0 That is why I was shocked to find myself in love at first sight with a little alpine geranium, Erodium x variabile \u2018Album\u2019.<\/p>\n
Erodiums are known as heron\u2019s bills, because of their long-nosed seed pods.\u00a0 They are members of the geranium family, closely related to hardy geraniums, which go by the nickname \u201ccranesbill\u201d.\u00a0 Cranesbills and heron\u2019s bills have lobed or dissected green leaves and five-petaled flowers.\u00a0 Depending on the species, the flowers in both genera can be white, shades of pink, purple or blue-purple.\u00a0 Some have contrasting stripes adorning the petals.\u00a0 Happy cranesbills reproduce nicely; happy erodium reproduce exponentially.\u00a0 I know because I bought one variegated erodium about eight years ago.\u00a0 I now have scores of them\u2014and that is a conservative estimate.<\/p>\n
I have no memory of the species or varietal name of the rabbit-like heron\u2019s bill that is expanding its reach, minute by minute, in my front garden.\u00a0 The new arrival is Erodium x variabile \u2018Album\u2019.\u00a0 Students of horticulture know that an \u201cx\u201d in a plant name always indicates a hybrid, either natural or man-made.\u00a0 \u2018Album\u2019 means white flowered.\u00a0 In this case, each tiny white flower petal is adorned with a single violet stripe.\u00a0 The lobed leaves are less than an inch wide.\u00a0 I caught sight of \u2018Album\u2019 in a garden center, while searching for the water feature components that would fulfill my own amorphous dream.\u00a0 The flowers were so lovely and the plant so perfect that I snatched it up.\u00a0 I forgot all about pumps, liners and dimensions and moved swiftly to the check-out.\u00a0 My heart thumped and my head filled with rationalizations.\u00a0 The plant was dirt cheap and there was only one on the pallet.\u00a0 Life doesn\u2019t always give you second chances and I was totally smitten with Erodium x variabile.<\/p>\n
When I got home I put the plant on my porch, far from the hungry jaws of Mr. Antlers, his consort, Jane Doe, their children and new grandchild.\u00a0 Back in my home office, I researched the new arrival.\u00a0 As with so many interesting things, \u2018Album\u2019 has a back story.\u00a0 It seems that it is native to the Mediterranean and has the traits of two local species, alpine geranium\u2014Erodium reichardii\u2014and Corsican geranium\u2014Erodium corsicum.\u00a0 Botanists doubted that it was a reichardii\/corsicum hybrid because the two species could not be hybridized in captivity.\u00a0 Eventually the Royal Horticultural Society got into the paternity debate and resolved it in the new-fashioned way with DNA testing.\u00a0 Apparently my variabile hybrid is indeed the offspring of the two erodium in question.\u00a0 While unwilling to reproduce under the watchful eyes of alpine plant enthusiasts, they are perfectly willing to combine forces in the wild.\u00a0 I don\u2019t blame them.\u00a0 There is something to be said for fresh air and an absence of prying eyes.<\/p>\n
My variabile erodium will ultimately form a cushion about four inches high and twelve inches wide.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if it will reproduce as readily as its already-established relative.\u00a0 Right now it is growing in a pot, so it will have less chance of doing so.\u00a0 Still, cranesbills and heron\u2019s bills are notorious for spitting their seeds great distances.\u00a0 You never know.\u00a0 For those with worries about plants with those kinds of prolific tendencies, I can attest to the fact that the seedlings are very easy to grub out.\u00a0 The lovely little flowers are worth it.<\/p>\n
Alpine geranium \u201cAlbum\u201d is sold under the Plants That Work in Nooks and Crannies label.\u00a0 Plants in that line are available at many local nurseries and garden centers, though not in the big box merchandiser\u2019s.\u00a0 Look for them in the groundcover or small plant section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Victorians and Edwardians had a passion for rock or alpine gardens, creating extensive pseudo-alpine landscapes from actual rocks, artificial rocks and various forms of debris, up to and including broken dishes.\u00a0 Fashionable gardeners filled the cracks and crevices of these layouts with alpine plants newly discovered by plant hunters in various mountainous regions of … 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":[6,2,3],"tags":[230,587,589,174,586,588,590],"class_list":["post-840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-alpine-plants","tag-erodium","tag-groundcovers","tag-hardy-geraniums","tag-herons-bill","tag-nooks-and-crannies","tag-rock-garden-plants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840","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=840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":841,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions\/841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}