How to Grow Hardy Geraniums

Hardy Geraniums are frost hardy herbaceous perennial which is easy to grow and suitable for all soil types.

Hardy geraniums are a versatile border plant, long flowering, suitable for most growing conditions, and they mix well with other summer flowering perennials. This group of Geraniums, whose common name is Cranesbill, are fully hardy to H7 which means they will withstand our winters and return reliably in the spring. They should not be confused with Pelargoniums (also often called Geraniums.) which are not hardy and typically used in summer bedding displays. 

Geraniums varying significantly in size from Geranium pratense,  the meadow cranesbill, which grows to around 1 meter, to small compact low growing varieties such  Geranium sanguineum which is around 30 cms. The gallery below illustrates around 10 different types of Geranium, the main variation is in size.An added bonus, both bees and butterflies love Geraniums.

Geraniums flower in a range of colours typically blue, purple, pink and white, and often has attractive markings or veins inside the flowers.  Some planting ideas are illustrated below. Geraniums look good with Candelabra primula, red Geum, Alchemilla mollis  and roses .

Growing geraniums around Alliums is common practice to cover the base leaves of Alliums, which can look untidy, even early in the season.   

Some Geraniums are long flowering and will flower right from June to frosts.  This type of Geranium will come back year after year, although the herbaceous varieties will disappear over winter and regrow in the spring. 

If Geraniums are not the garden plant for you, for more ideas check out  summer flowering plants  spring flowering plants  20 Best scented plants  and climbing plants for more inspiring ideas. 

One of the good things about Growing Geraniums is that they need little attention and they will grow in most soils, (except waterlogged,) in full sun or in partial shade. The only effort when growing Geraniums is regarding dead heading and because most varieties of Geranium produce a lot of flowers, this equates to a lot of dead heading. 

Dead heading can be time consuming, and there are two ways of tackling this. One way is to dead head each flower individually, which may be practical at the beginning of the summer, but as more and more flowers appear and die on the plant, it can become too time consuming. 

 The image below shows the very large number of spent flowers some Geraniums can produce dead headed in one session. 

The alternative, which is helpful when the foliage becomes tired looking later in the summer, is to cut the plant right back during the summer after it's had a good spell of flowering. It will quickly re grow and produce new green foliage and usually a further flush flowers. If you don't want to look at the bare earth whilst waiting for it to grow back, you can always prune it before  you go on holiday and when you come back, there will be a neat green mound of new foliage.

In the images below, I cut the Geranium cut back on 25th June. As the image shows, the plant has become a bit leggy with lots of flowers.I took the next image on 26th July by which time the plant has grown back and started flowering again.

There are many geraniums to choose from in all shades of pink, blue, white and all are easy to grow.

In addition to those illustrated, G. Blue cloud has the AGM award and is a lovely soft blue growing to around 30cms and will grow in sun and partial shade. G. Rozanne 'Gerwat' has the AGM is similar but with a white centre. 

A good white variety with the AGM award is G. macrorrhizum 'White-Ness' which forms a carpet of low growing white flowers