I was fortunate enough to travel to Vancouver and then Ireland in July/August last year where the hanging baskets of mixed flowers which love temperate moist climates were spectacular.
At Liz at Lancaster our hanging baskets, in the otherwise unprepossessing parking area with its bricked surface and green carports, always cause guest comments. Hardy geraniums (indigenous to the Northern Hemisphere( are always a win).
But our celebrated baskets pale into insignificance in comparison with the overflowing abundance of those in northern climes …
And in Ireland I became aware that the geranium-type flowers in the baskets were actually Pelargoniums (fewer petals in an asymmetrical arrangement of 2 on the top and 3 at the bottom of each bloom). With a mixture of admiration and envy, I couldn’t help wondering how these South African indigenes had ended up across the seas in these cooler climates. And as often happens when you start thinking about something, the issue serendipitously pops up again soon after. So only a few days after returning to South Africa an article appeared in the Daily Maverick entitled “The humble Karoo bloom that went global, trans- forming window boxes around the world”.
And here the history of the travels of one species of Pelargonium was revealed. In 1689 a Dutch East India Company gardener called Heinrich Bernhard Oldenland collected a slip and seeds of a particular Pelargonium species Pelargonium zonale in Meiringspoort in the Karroo and took it back to his Cape Town garden where he started cultivating it. Cuttings of this hardy little plant left the Cape on the early 1700s and before long it filled countless Dutch window boxes. J.J Van Der Walt in his book Pelargoniums of Southern Africa, records that by 1687, the gardens of Leiden in Holland already had 10 species of South African pelargoniums. But the one that was to be most famous and prolific was Oldendal’s Pelargonium zonale. In 1710 this species appears again in botanical record, when Mary Somerset, the Duchess of Beaufort, was growing it in her greenhouse in Chelsea outside London. She is said to have developed several variations from it, crossing it with the red-flowering Pelargonium inquinans from the Eastern Cape.
There are Pelargonium species indigenous to other parts of the world: other parts of Africa, the Middle East, Madagascar, St Helena, Australia and New Zealand amongst others, but of the 270 species of Pelargoniums in the world, South Africa has the most with 219. So, while we enjoy the hardy geraniums which are indigenous to the Northern Hemisphere, these colder moister climates also enjoy imports of Pelargoniums native to warm regions.
In the meantime our window boxes and hanging baskets add colour and vibrancy to the carpark and elicit endless admiration from guests. Thank you as always to Alick for his careful tending.