Playing with pelargoniums

I play with a lot of different breeding projects. Some of them are more-or-less sane, reasonable ideas that I think will be successful and valuable for gardens... And then there are the crazy things I try on the off chance they'll turn into something cool. I do a lot of those. Mostly because they are really fun, and because, well, why not? It takes hardly any time to splash a little pollen around and see what happens. If those initial forays turn out well, I can forward to try and breed something nice, and if not I'm not out much.

Currently, one of the odd-ball, probably-won't-work projects that I'm having fun with is breeding pelargonium. Not with zonal pelargoniums. They're kinda boring.

And no, not regals like these either, though they are gorgeous. I'd serious consider it, but the brilliant minds are Garden Genetics are already doing amazing things with them, (along with a lot of other cool stuff – you've gotta check out their blog where they post about all sorts of exciting projects) so I'll just wait (not very patiently) for their work to become commercially available.

No, I'm playing with a handful of rather obscure species that have caught my eye for various reasons.

P. caffrum has beautiful ferny leaves:

And, when it flowers (mine hasn't yet – but soon, I hope!) the flowers should by crazy fringed like this:

(photo from geraniaceae.com)

P. pulverulentum's flowers aren't nearly as exciting looking, but they do boast a really wonderful fragrance.

Both of these, along with a few others I'm growing, have tuberous roots and go dormant in the winter – which should be perfect! Winter dormant plants are easy to over winter in a garage or the like, unlike the bulk of the really cool species pelargoniums which go dormant in the summer, which isn't so easy to work into a climate like mine.

I'm also growing some odd-ball hybrids like this 'Arden' which... just love those colors on the flowers!

And of course I had to have P. sidoides, which has these amazing dark flowers over a neat mound of lovely silver leaves and is quite simply one of my most favorite plants of all time. This form is a more purpley-wine color than redder forms I've grown in the past, and seems to flower more heavily as well.

I ordered this rambling, irregular collection of plants from the wonderful nursery Geraniaceae (www.geraniaceae.com) (which you really MUST check out. Lovely, amazing stuff) and I thought, well, I'll just splash pollen around with a liberal hand and see what happens. I didn't really expect to get too much, figured the species would be too dissimilar to hybridize.

But, just the other day I noticed a few seed pods starting to develop! Happy dance!!!

So stay tuned... in a few years maybe I'll have crazy fringed fragrant flowers in a range of colors and... who knows what else! Or maybe none of the seed will germinate, and if they do the hybrids will be ugly and sterile. Or maybe something totally unexpected will happen. You can never really tell with plant breeding... and that's half the fun. Maybe more than half.