A Social Hierarchy - of Geraniums
In the Cotswolds, please say 'Pelargonium'. We're flower snobs, obvs.
Among certain circles, there’s officially no January in the Cotswolds. The Ladies have buzzed off to the places where it’s always summer - Mustique, Lamu, The Mill Reef Club, Kenya, Harbour Island - and parties, safaris and idle gossip are the order of the day for the Country Princesses who have winter homes elsewhere. That rarefied group exists in an alternate reality where New Year’s Day doesn’t actually occur until May 1st: there is ‘simply no point in being in England’ until the first peony has popped, the Pony Club is torturing child recruits at rallies and the summer term at the most expensive prep schools has commenced. If one can school one’s children in Verbier, Gstaad or Lech for the cruellest winter months, after all, why ever not? And skiing is ‘so educational’, isn’t it? That’s a rhetorical question, btw.
For yours truly, and most of my dear readers, such an escape is not in the realms of possibility. (So if I sound a little annoyed, ya, well, I am.) January is très grim for most of us, and I work hard at trying to make the best of it. I’m one of those people who loves Christmas so much that the time afterwards seems to be a penance paid in exact proportion to the delight I experienced over Christmas. England at this time has a bleakness all of its own: it feels permanently dark as sunrise is well after eight in the morning, sunset by four in the afternoon (oh, and there’s no actual ‘sun’ to speak of anyway); when it is daylight, it hardly counts as the skies are lead-grey; fog presses against the windows high up on our hills for days on end, making one feel claustrophobic; it’s too icy to ride and it’s so bitterly cold and damp that even the dogs refuse to go for a walk; worst of all, the Christmas decorations are down and there seems to be nothing to look forward to, unless you count a gruelling set of school exams coming up for my youngest daughter in the next few weeks.
Colour, then, is all but gone, and where in other months I fill the house with flowers which I cut from the garden to cheer things up, now I cannot for there is nothing in the garden but bare hawthorn and naked rose hips. Buying wildly expensive cut flowers seems, somehow, wrong. But, for those ladies such as moi who have been left behind to cope with January and dark school runs, there is one wildly inexpensive solution to this misery, and that is the pelargonium (Latin name) which is a type of geranium (common name) that, confusingly, bears no resemblance to the actual common geranium.
The difference is this: the common geranium, also known as a Hardy or Garden Geranium, originates from the northern hemisphere, is deciduous and grows outdoors; the Pelargonium, originating in South Africa, is part of the geranium family but from a different genus, is evergreen and ‘overwinters’ (as grand country ladies say) indoors. No one in the Cotswolds worth their salt uses the G-word, the P-word being preferable as it implies all sorts of crucial social signifiers: I have a substantial garden; I have greenhouses; I have gardeners; I have ‘a staff’ to move my pots, water my pots, feed my pots (ya, these flowers need speciality meals of something called potash).
I was first exposed to the social hierarchy of geraniums when I wrote a story for American Vogue about Georgia, Duchess of Beaufort and her life at Badminton House in Gloucestershire, where the RHS is holding a flower show this July (Think the Chelsea Flower Show, transplanted to the Cotswolds). Her drawing room, the hallway and the dining room sideboards all groaned under the weight of giant Delft or Amari pots planted up with leafy shrubs boasting flowers of pinks, dark burgundies and creamy whites.
