GARDENING / Power Flowers: A hand-picked guide to hardy perennials - 4: Geranium

HARDY Geraniums, or cranesbills, are not at all like the bright nodding versions that share their name and which are more properly called Pelargoniums. The cranesbills are modest flowers, but they keep going for almost as long as their namesakes. They are the sort of plant it is useful to have around when you want to cover the ground, but cannot cover the bills. Beg or buy one or two pieces of root in spring and, by the end of the summer, bare earth will be clothed in subtly cut leaves and soft, small flowers.

Geranium wallichianum was introduced to Regency England by a Dane. There is a better form of it which was raised by a Mr Buxton in Wales, that is bluer. This one, G w 'Buxton's Variety', is the one to seek - the original is a dingy mauve. Both forms of wallichianum are spreading, trailing plants that flower from midsummer until the autumn frosts. I like 'Buxton's Variety' as ground cover with rosemaries, or growing through the leaves of peonies, or on its own in a sprawl of blue. Like all cranesbills it is not too fussy about site and soil, but it prefers sun, with conditions that are not too dry.

The bloody cranesbill, G sanguineum, is magenta purple which is never the easiest colour to manage, but it looks good growing among other purple and white flowers. Try it with Viola 'Huntercombe Purple' and the white Viola cornuta, beneath Hebe 'La Seduisante'. Together these make a colour scheme of clerical purple which would not look out of place in a bishop's palace. In its pale pink form, G s lancastriense, it would offend no one. This makes a neat hump of a plant, a tidy contrast to the trailing 'Buxton's'. In paving stones it flowers persistently and although the flowers are not large, lancastriense always gets noticed. But it is not as quick to spread as some of its more vigorous relations.

A darker pink, and slightly larger than lancastriense, is the near evergreen G 'Russell Prichard'. In fact its leaves are greyer than they are green, so it is the best form to choose where foliage is as important as flowers. 'Russell Prichard' is very long in flower and is one of the geraniums which makes an impression from a distance. If I had to restrict my choice to one cranesbill it would be this pink flowered form. The only snag about 'Russell Prichard' is that in cold places its parentage can let it down. A cross between G sanguineum and the not totally hardy G traversii, you can occasionally lose it. The cognoscenti claim that another traversii cross, 'Mavis Simpson', is even better. But since the time I tried to see it growing in much vaunted drifts in a famous garden, only to be told that most had died in the winter, I have been disinclined to rely on Mavis. It is also very hard to obtain, being one of those plants that you can only secure by joining a waiting list.

G endressi 'Wargrave Pink' would never let you down, nor do you need to wait to acquire a root of this rapid coloniser. There is a hint of salmon pink about this geranium which will climb through, round, up and over everything in its path. It is not a plant to let loose among rarities, but in a dark corner on unpromising soil, it will be pink and green all summer.

(Photograph omitted)