I probably would not have bought this book if I hadn't spent untold hours painting a specimen in watercolour...and thus gained some intimacy with the species......and wanted to know a bit more about it. Certainly, this book delivers. Maybe it's a bit too slanted to the literature side of talk about geraniums but it still has enough of the science to satisfy me. (Though I think it would have benefited by , at least one clearly labelled botanical drawing of the flower and sub parts).
I was interested in its origins and found that: "Thirty-two species of Pelargonium are dispersed quite widely: eighteen in East Africa; eight in Australasia; two in Madagascar; two in Turkey; and one each on the islands of Tristan da Cunha and St Helena. All the others originate in the tip of southern Africa; and in particular, in the Cape Floristic Region (CFR), the smallest and most diverse of the six Floral Kingdoms.
Ninety thousand square kilometres of land at the tip of the continent contains around 10,000 species; or, to put it another way, 0.5 per cent of Africa's landmass contains nearly 20 per cent of its flora". (This last claim is confusing.....does she mean 20 percent of the pelargoniums or all flora....presumably the latter).

And I was confused about nomenclature: are they geraniums or pelargoniums. Predictably, there is no clear-cut answer; "The bright red geranium isn't, botanically speaking, a Geranium at all; in fact it's probably a Pelargonium x hortorum. Specialists can get very shirty when people get this wrong - and they often do. The confusion arose in the seventeenth century when the first pelargoniums were brought from southern Africa to Europe. Like the hardy perennials that Europeans knew as geraniums, these tender shrubs had flowers of five petals and therefore five seedpods, each of which resembled a crane's elongated head and beak. " But it didn't take botanists long to observe that, apart from their seed-heads, geraniums and pelargoniums are really very different. Geraniums have regular flowers, in most cases consisting of five identical petals, and ten to fifteen pollen-producing stamens. Pelargoniums have irregular flowers - the two upper petals differing from the lower three in size, shape and markings - with a nectar spur and only two to seven pollen-producing stamens. Unlike pelargoniums, geraniums are never red. These morphological differences were hard to miss and in 1732, the Oxford botanist Johann Jakob Dillenius suggested that if anyone wishes to make a new genus of these geraniums which have unequal or irregular flowers... they be called after the Greek word for a stork - pelargonium - just as we called geraniums from the crane." The distinction might have caught on at this point had it not been decisively rejected just a few years later by the most influential botanist of the era, Linnaeus. Linnaeus's Species Plantarum (1753) was the groundbreaking work that established binominal nomenclature for seed plants - that is, giving the name of the species in a Latin binomial, the genus followed by a single epithet. Pelargonium peltatum, then, is the pelargonium with shield-shaped leaves, although now more generally known as ivy-leaved. Linnaeus included twenty pelargoniums in his book, but neither he nor his followers accepted that the observable differences from geraniums and erodiums were sufficient to justify a generic division.

Today L'Héritier is recognized for describing, in his unpublished manuscript and in Aiton's Hortus Kewensis, 21 distinct species of Pelargonium and, more importantly, for establishing the botanical distinction between the genera once and for all.
But maintaining that distinction wasn't so simple. By this time, 'African geraniums' had been around for 150 years and British commercial growers and gardeners were reluctant to give up the familiar name!" (There was less fuss in other European countries, which came later to the plants.)......Nearly wo hundred years later, the battle of nomenclature rumbles on, and passions haven't cooled. There are certainly inconsistencies. It is not uncommon to find, in the same book or garden centre, "pelargonium' being applied to scented-leaved or Regal varieties, with geranium' reserved for bedding plants.......Specialists are sterner. Diana Miller maintains there can be no excuse today for the incorrect use of the name "Geranium", while Hazel Key says it's all due to a wilfulness on the part of gardeners and horticulturalists .....The Pelargonium and Geranium Society, meanwhile, has debated its own designation for decades!" But perhaps the issue is less one of scientific misinterpretation than an indifference to taxonomy. And, I guess that's what we have to accept. The geranium can certainly be distinguished from Pelargoniums but seems to be formally classified as a Pelargonium.

"In 2011 the International Register and Checklist of Pelargonium Cultivars included more than 16,000 varieties. The number is staggering, especially if we consider how few species these hybrids derive from. The largest group by far consists of variations on the upright scarlet zonal geranium, beloved of song and terracotta pot. This group has as its distant ancestors Pelargonium zonale, whose leaves have distinctive horseshoe-shaped markings, and P. inquinans or the 'staining pelargonium', named for the dye produced by its sap. The geraniums that trail from the balconies of Swiss chalets and clamber up palm trees in California, meanwhile, all derive from an ivy-leaved species called Pelargonium peltatum. The food and cosmetics industries, meanwhile, rely on aromatic oils that are extracted from the scented leaves of hybrids descended from crosses between the rose-geranium', P. capitatum, and either P. graveolens (whose name means 'strongly scented') or P. radens (named for its rasp-like leaves)! These are the species and cultivars that this book mainly considers".

Pelargonium has now been reclassified into two subgenera, in each of which a correlation can be seen between chromosome size and geographical distribution. The first is 'Pelargonium', whose small-chromosomed members account for around 80 per cent of all species....... and include the parents of most scented leaved varieties, the Angel pelargoniums and the Uniques, as well as the species, P. cucullatum, from which all Regal pelargoniums have been developed'. The members of the other sub-genus, 'Ciconium', have large-sized chromosomes and include the ancestors of zonal and ivy-leaved pelargoniums.

The great majority of geraniums purchased today are commercially produced in one of two ways: by seed or by cutting During the 1960s experiments into pelargonium seed propagation at Pennsylvania State University led to the development of FI varieties: that is, plants that are guaranteed to be true to type since the seed from which they are raised is produced each time by repeating the initial cross between the hybrid's two parents? Seed-raised geraniums are particularly popular with growers, such as parks departments.

The geraniums sold in garden centres are produced by a small number of multinational companies from fresh cuttings derived from a closely guarded 'mother stock'. Syngenta, for example, roots and develops its cuttings in Kenya before sending them back to Holland and Germany to be packed in plug trays and pots and then distributed throughout Europe. They are certainly popular plants as roughly 120 million geraniums are grown annually, just in the US.;

One of the side products is geraniol or geranium oil used in the fragrance market. Perfumery represents only a small part of the fragrance market. Approximately 220 tons of geranium oil (with annual value of nearly £7 million) is sold annually for use in the production of all manner of soaps, creams, detergents and air-fresheners, as well as in the aromatherapy industry. It is also used as a flavouring and preservative in drinks, ice-cream, baked goods, jams and chocolate. On a smaller scale, domestic cooks add scented leafs to cakes and jams, to contribute a citrus, rose or peppermint flavour.

And yes, it gets its share of mentions in English literature and other literature but I guess, I was much less interested in this aspect of geranium lore. A reasonably thorough and interesting book in this series and i'm happy to give it three stars. ( )