When Cleo isn’t eating the roses, she’s chewing on the geraniums. I think that she actually prefers them. I don’t mind that she eats them. They are so prolific and ever blooming.
I haven’t always been fond of geraniums. When I was a kid we had zonal geraniums planted along the parking strip. Because we lived on two corners, that meant we had lots of them. They were so hardy nothing hurt them. My father let us pick them and do whatever we wanted with them. The only other plants we could touch this way was the Bougainvillea.
With this in mind I always thought of geraniums as weeds. They were so prolific and in the 1950′s and 60′s seemed to be the flower everyone in San Diego planted. (Ice Plant was just as plentiful.)
In 1977, on my Cooperstown Graduate School class trip we were going to a classmate’s parents’ house for dinner and the group I was riding with wanted to stop and get flowers. The flowers they wanted were geraniums. My response was that geraniums were not a good choice–that it was giving weeds. I had no idea that the rest of the country adored geraniums.
In fact, when I moved to Denver I discovered that what I considered the lowly geranium was highly coveted and the local nurseries gave more room to geraniums than to any other flower.
