I feel like a bit of a copycat, considering the craze that’s consuming Carolyn and Jessica these days, but I bought two new pelargoniums today. I can’t quite wrap my mind around calling them “pelargoniums,” actually, both because I grew up calling all such plants “geraniums” (and at least one of mine is truly a geranium) and because I keep wanting to say “pelargonia” instead of “pelargoniums” (curiously, I have no similar resistance to “geraniums”). In any case, I bought two new ones today, to go along with the four I already had.

When we first moved into this house a little over two years ago, my mother-in-law gave me two starts from her own plants and they turned into lovely plants in their own right, with bright red-orange flowers. A few months ago, Tage pulled off a rather large stem from one of them, so I stuck it in a glass of water and over the course of time it turned into a third plant. When geraniums were on sale cheap at my local Konsum earlier this spring, I started thinking that it would be nice to have a bit more variety in color, so I bought the nicest looking plant and figured that the odds were in my favor that it wouldn’t be the same color as the three I already had. Turns out I figured wrong, or mostly wrong at any rate, and the flowers are a red that from a distance looks identical to the red-orange flowers of my original three plants.

Finally, not being able to stand the monotony any longer, I went to the flower store this afternoon and chose two new geraniums, both flowering, in distinctly non-red colors. One is a pale pink and the other looks almost yellowish (it’s barely past bud stage and the only thing I can tell for sure at this point is that it’s most assuredly not red). When I still lived in the States I had a modest variety of geraniums and my absolute favorite was one that had true orange flowers. I didn’t see any oranges at all today, but I’ll be on the lookout in the future.

My problem now is that I have a total of thirteen houseplants crowded on to two smallish windowsills in my kitchen and I don’t really have room to expand elsewhere. Looks like I’ll soon be in the market for more shelving, as well as for orange geraniums.