Geraniums by any other (correct) name

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — You know that beautiful pot of geraniums with the gorgeous red blooms you have growing alongside your deck? We hate to tell you this, but those aren't geraniums.

Neither are the ones on the hillside with the vivid orange flowers. And the pot of lemon-scented geraniums hanging by the front door? Sorry, but no.

You can blame the father of plant taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, who decided there was no reason to divide the geraniums, the plants you only thought you had, from the pelargoniums, the plants you most likely do have.

"Botanists propose, gardeners dispose," says Robin Parer, a leading expert on geraniums — and pelargoniums.

Parer, who owns a Marin County, Calif., nursery that specializes only in geraniums, pelargoniums and the related erodiums, is on a bit of a one-woman mission to correct an historical mistake that has people falling in love with a wrongly named plant while missing out on some truly amazing correctly named plants.

"Geraniums are fantastic plants," Parer says. "They are really like wildflowers that we've captured and brought into the garden."

Geraniums are enduring plants with a huge number of varieties available for almost any condition. They differ from pelargoniums in a number of ways. The most distinct, however are size and color of blooms. Geraniums are small and compact, and their flowers have a more delicate look to them. The flowers are blue, pink or white. If you've got a geranium with red flowers, you've actually got a pelargonium.

HISTORICAL MISTAKE

The problem started more than 300 years ago with properly identified geraniums growing happily in England. Then the British got a bit of wanderlust and started exploring the globe. During ocean voyages, British ships would stop at the Cape of Good Hope to resupply their ships, and the captains, ship's doctors and other educated crew would do some exploring, collecting samples of the flora they found there.

And one of the plants they found was Pelargonium triste, a South African native that bore an unfortunate resemblance to the geranium.

DIE IS CAST

In the mid 1700s, Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist and doctor, began studying the taxonomy of plants and created an ordering system. Because the geranium and pelargonium are both members of the Geraniaceae family, Linnaeus, over the protests of some botanists, included both in the same genus, Geranium.