I am the third generation of a clique of geranium lovers.  And I am the last, because I did not have offspring.  Three is a good number, though. A lucky number: my grandmother, mother, and I.   Possibly post-apocalyptic, though, since two of the gens are gone and God knows what’s going on with the weather, and what will happen to geraniums and the gens of the future.

Here’s what I want to know:  is there still a Generation Geranium?

My mother and grandmother loved geraniums because they were easy to grow. And the women in my neighborhood liked them for the same reason. I cannot remember any of the stay-at-home moms having time to do more than plant geraniums or marigolds. The women stayed in the pods of their houses reading Georgette Heyer or the Pulitzer Prize- winning housewife poet Phyllis McGinley.  There were also the magazine readers:  McCall’s, Time,  Newsweek, Life, Reader’s Digest, often with cigarette burns on the pages.

I see few geraniums in gardens nowadays, but these hardy annuals are pretty in an old-fashioned way (with a historical connection: they were introduced into the U.S. by Thomas Jefferson who ordered some from France). You can plant them in pots or in the ground, take them indoors in the fall, and they will bloom off and on all year, more off than on, but perk up again in the summer. 

There are some beautiful gardens in my neighborhood. There are Empire State Building- tall sunflowers, unruly wild flowers, common daisies, hollyhocks, lilies, hostas, narcissi, impatiens, roses, bluebells, and chemically-induced perfect flowers (we earnestly told the owner that the chemicals poison the ground water, but he/she was unfazed). No geraniums.

Gardening memoirists don’t write about the common geranium, either. In Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden, published anonymously in 1898 and very popular, the garden was her sanctuary from the tyranny of social calls and from her husband, ominously called The Man of Wrath. At first the garden was a wilderness, she says. The gardener did all the work, but she began to give directions.  She writes a few pages later:  “If only I could dig and plant myself!  How much easier, besides being so fascinating,  to make your own holes exactly where you want them and put in your plants exactly as you choose instead of giving orders that can only be half understood from the moment you depart from the lines laid down by that long piece of string!”

Although I love von Arnim’s novels, particularly The Caravaners and The Enchanted April, I am irritated by her gardening diary.  Why can’t she dig and do the planting?  Too rich?  Sick?  She must conquer the gardener by the end of the book and do some work – I admit I did not reread it- but I flicked through the pages and the word “geranium” did not pop out.

Perhaps other garden writers fill the gap.  I would love to read Richardson Wright’s The Gardener’s Bed-Book:  Short and Long Pieces to Be Read in Bed.  He was the editor of House and Garden in the 1920s, and this collection of his columns is reputed to be charming and witty.  Apparently his wife never goes into the garden. He gives her the first flowers of every season, but the only flower she appreciates is the rose.

Did he write about geraniums?  Perhaps.

I also have a gardening novel on my list, Old Herbaceoous by Reginal Arkell. It is said to be the comical story of a boy who l steals wild flowers and grows up to be a head gardener at the manor house and judge of a prestigious flower show.  It is supposed to be very funny, and is compared to P. G. Wodehouse.

I’d love to be a gardener. I really would. But I’m too busy reading.

The geraniums are for my gardening what they were for past Gen Geraniums.