Meetings with plants: purple cranesbill
Bramble & Briar #114
The garden is a roiling, billowing creature now. It’s May, so rain I can get my head round. This windy, semi-stormy fare? New one on me. I’m going to sit here by the window and tell you about one of my best-loved garden plants, while all the petals get blown off the blooms.
I can’t begin to imagine why the purple cranesbill Geranium x magnificum isn’t everybody’s favourite hardy geranium, but it doesn’t begin to get the attention of some other varieties. Honestly, you can keep your Rozanne, for all it might be a bit longer flowering. Maybe I’m in the minority in being captivated by luminous, bright violet triangles of silk, veined in deep purple, and held aloft over deep, luxuriantly green foliage in such profusion you’d think some fiendish strain of horticultural genius had been hard at work for weeks, if not months, in order to procure such a display. But, being a hardy geranium, no such exertions are called for – it’s a plant you bung in the ground, and then do precisely nothing to, save for administering the famed Chelsea Chop (cutting the plant right back just before they flower in mid May) to half your stock in order to delay their flowering, or a Hampton Hack (a similarly brutal snip as the flowers begin to go over at the end of June) to promote a second flush. And both of these interventions are entirely optional.
This flower has a depth and richness of colour that looks just as stunning on in a downpour as it does on a sunny day, harmonizing perfectly with pinks and oranges, complementing greens. A total winner, healthy but not as bonkers as an Oxbridge hybrid, beloved of bees, and, in case I’ve not already made it clear, this gardener.
is it totally hardy??? I understood it was not.