Geranium Resurrection

When we bought this house one of the things we loved was the mature landscaping, including a large geranium which climbed a trellis, forming a wall next to the stairs of our deck. It bloomed nearly year round, blossoms periwinkle and a pale pink.

Looking for pictures of it now, I realize how much we took it for granted. In the first decade we lived here I can find pictures of our trees, the natal lilies, the roses, and both butterfly bushes (which tended to grow crazy fast, blossom profusely, then die off just as suddenly). But hardly anything of that wall of geraniums.

We had to replace the trellis behind it when our dear old Doberman/German Shepherd mix Vinnie in his dotage slipped on the steps and fell between the stairs and the trellis, knocking it down.

It was a rainy dark winter morning, and I heard the commotion of the trellis breaking. I hustled down the wet step and found the sweet old boy under the stairs, wedged in among gardening supplies. He wagged when he saw me, as if to say, Wow, am I glad to see you!

We bought a new trellis and attached it to the stairs. The geraniums thrived for a few more years, and then a gradual die off began. We trimmed back the dead leaves and vines, did what we could to encourage it, and took it for granted no more, but it was gone.

When we pulled out the rotting planter, a large old rectangular thing about four feet wide, we could see how the roots had grown through the bottom. This house had a fire half a century ago, and debris was dumped in the back. Mrs. O has tried three times now to keep a hydrangea  at the foot of the stairs and theorizes that something toxic got buried there, which has hindered the hydrangeas—might the roots of the geraniums found it, too?

Or had the geraniums merely lived out their lives? It was happily mature when we arrived.

A couple years went by, and then, one day when we were weeding the base of the hydrangea, there we found them, deep among the invasive spider plants and the tenacious grasses grubbing for rich wet soil at the base of the hydrangea. Two little vines of geranium, the unmistakable faint purplish watermark staining the leaves. Shoots from a dormant root?

I delicately extracted them, with tiny root balls in dirt, replanting them with rich compost, tending them on our sun-drenched deck until they grew so strong we moved them down to the yard, and began looking for a planter.

In the meantime, they grew so happily they were crawling up into the deck stairs, and it was tough to extract them to replant. But we managed, even trying to intertwine vines with the trellis.

We’d have liked a bigger planter, but this should suffice. And we’re happy to have geraniums again, thriving and reaching for the trellis, our leafy resurrection.