Hardy Plant Society

Love at First Sight

Can you fall in love with a plant? Oh yes. Instantly. Erodium pelargoniiflorum stole my heart the moment I first saw it, thirty years ago, growing in a friend’s garden. She kindly gave me seed, and this plant and I have conducted a love affair ever since.

In a mild winter, the cheery little pink and white, veined flowers begin appearing in late February, a sign that spring really is on its way. And they keep on coming, through March, April and only in late May does the thing began to look a bit seedy. Who can blame it, after three and a half months of bloom. The seeds form at the base of a long, pointed ‘beak’, like a geranium, to which erodiums are close relatives. (‘Erodios’ is Greek for ‘heron’, whereas ‘geranos’ was a crane. Me, I don’t go round comparing the beaks of herons and cranes and matching them up to plants, but someone with a keen eye, or not enough to occupy him, obviously did).

After all that flowering effort, the parent plant usually becomes a bit tired and woody. It wants to be perennial, and in its native Turkey probably always is, but a hard British winter will see it off. No matter, the seeds have been catapulted around, and the young plants survive cold well. An endearing result of the seeds’ energetic ejection is that they often land where you could never plant them. One grew in a crack in the concrete apron of the garage last year, fortunately not where the tyres went. It looked ravishing.

I always send seed of Erodium pelargoniiflorum to the HPS Seed Exchange, yet hardly ever see it growing anywhere but my own garden. It needs sun, as one might expect given its country of origin, and appreciates dry soil, which I can provide. But it is an easy, good tempered plant with delightful flowers, so it’s strange that it isn’t seen everywhere.

Several other erodiums have proved good little doers, given sun and dry soil – the family hails from Asia Minor and the Mediterranean.

E. guttatum has green, ferny leaves and pinky-mauve flowers with an endearing dark blotch in the centre. Six inches high, it has made a slowly spreading clump, ending up two foot wide, flowering prettily from May to September. It shrugs off even hard winters, but one summer a vole took a fancy to it and greedily ate the poor plant to the ground. A declaration of war in my eyes.

The family colours are pink, mauve and white, but E. chrysanthum is independent-minded enough to sport pale yellow flowers in May. They don’t last long though. As some compensation the grey-tinged, filigree leaves are attractive all the time, and again, make a big clump.

Thinking that all erodiums were sure-fire winners, I grew E. manescavii from HPS seed one year. Well, it depends what you mean by ‘winner’. These grew with alacrity, to about a foot in height, the sturdy, divided leaves topped on long stalks by dark-blotched flowers of screaming cerise. The colour could probably have been managed, given a place that needed brightening up, but its self-seeding habits were a different matter. Some plants are just too enthusiastic, and it had to go.

A plant family is much like a human one. If you get on well with one member, it’s odds on you’ll like the others. Erodium manescavii is the only badly behaved individual discovered so far. E. pelargoniflorum is still my favourite, but there are a lot of species to try, and quite a few hybrids too, which have the advantage of flowering from late spring to the frosts, since they don’t set seed. Common sense says it’s probably time to stop at the five that already flourish in the garden, and others won’t actively be sought. But if I see interesting ones for sale, well, who said gardeners were sensible.

A. Scott