Where does Garden geranium (Pelargonium) come from?
The garden geranium comes from South Africa's Cape. Botanically it is a pelargonium, a hybrid of two wild shrubs from the Western and Eastern Cape, and today it is the most common 'geranium' sold in pots for windowsills and balconies.
From the Cape to Leiden
Pelargonium is a large genus of plants, and about 90% of its species grow in southern Africa. The first one known to be cultivated, Pelargonium triste, was probably brought to the botanical garden in Leiden before 1600 on ships that had stopped at the Cape of Good Hope. In 1631 the English gardener John Tradescant the elder bought seeds in Paris and introduced it to England. By 1724 several more species had reached Europe, including both parents of the garden geranium.
Two wild parents
Pelargonium zonale, which gave the hybrids the dark zone on their leaves, was collected in the Western Cape in 1689 and described by the Dutch botanist Jan Commelijn. Pelargonium inquinans, a shrub of the Eastern Cape and southern KwaZulu-Natal, was grown in the early 1700s by Henry Compton, Bishop of London, and gave the hybrids their scarlet. Gardeners crossed and selected the two for more than a century, and the American botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey named the result Pelargonium × hortorum, 'of the gardens'.
Why people think of the Mediterranean
Red 'geraniums' on sunny balconies look like southern European plants, and the name points to Europe too. Linnaeus grouped the Cape plants with the true geraniums, named after the crane, which are mostly temperate plants that die down in winter. In 1789 Charles Louis L'Héritier de Brutelle gave them their own genus, Pelargonium, from the Greek for 'stork', because the seed head looks like a stork's beak. Gardeners kept calling them geraniums, but pelargoniums can tolerate only light frosts.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Pelargonium × hortorum ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Pelargonium ↗ · pza.sanbi.org ↗ · ars.usda.gov ↗
