For the last few years, my mother has been kind enough to give me as many geraniums as I can manage at the end of the season. She has some of the largest ones I've ever seen, huge, almost top-heavy heads of lavender, salmon, fuschia, pale pink and that orange-y red I used to hate ('cause that's all there was in Geranium World) but now love. I've potted them up and put them in windows all over the house.
Some advise that geraniums should be cut back and then put in the window, but I've never done that. The results have been spectacular! They thrive in my dining room, filling the windows with their cheery blooms all winter long. Some I've transplanted back outside in the spring, also with excellent results. Two containers out front had luxurious red ones all summer. Despite the cold, they're still blooming away, though piles of crispy brown leaves cover the base of the containers.
This fall I decided to branch out and try to bring other plants indoors. I read that you can do this with impatiens and Persian shield and so, that's exactly what I did a couple of weeks ago. One of my friends told me to let her know how it goes. She's never had any luck with impatiens over the winter. Ironically, as I dug them up for the trip inside these annuals had never been fuller or brighter.
Anyway, in the two or three weeks since all this uprooting began, the Persian shield drooped as if I'd poisoned it and the impatiens' flowers dried up, turned into projectiles and flung themselves all over the sill and rugs. The leaves inexplicably narrowed and stiffened and now they look nothing like an impatiens, more like a generic Plantus plantus. (See photo)
But I carry on, unwilling to believe that all this work was for naught. I even bought large new pots. I did take a few of Mom's geraniums, as always, and wouldn't you know. As if to mock me, they're once again blooming up a storm in every window they inhabit.
Can a plant say "I told you so?"
