I was the slightest in the House --
I took the smallest Room --

At night, my little Lamp, and Book -- And one Geranium -- ...
Except to Heaven, she is nought,

Except for Angels -- lone.
Except to some wide-wandering Bee

A flower superfluous blown. ... 21
How many Flowers fail in the Wood
Or perish from the Hill --

Without the privilege to know

That they are Beautiful -- ...22

(Poem 486, Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886)

When I see a potted geranium, I think of my mother and my oldest sister, Joan. I don’t know who of these two started the tradition of always having a few pots on the porch or patio. They would both cover their plants with sheets during the schizophrenic Texas winters. Mother had a garage, and until she became too frail to move the usually-largish pots, that’s where her plants went during freezing weather. I do know that both Mother and Joan let their geraniums get “out of control”, for some reason, even though they both knew that the plants love to be pruned so that they can flourish anew. Plants have a mind of their own, indeed.

I like geraniums, but I hadn’t given them much thought beyond Mother and Joan’s garden spots until I started living in New Mexico. Geraniums are everywhere here, but especially noticeable during the winter when they take up residence in the sun-receiving windows of lots of homes. In her 1935 recollection, Winter in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan writes about geraniums wintering in her windows. I’m surprised that no one of her many famous or becoming famous artist contemporaries—those who came to Taos largely because of the society of artists that was begun by Luhan—painted geraniums in her or their own windows. Likely someone did, and it’s not a famous painting—or I just don’t know about the painting.

My loosely-conceived to-do list includes finding an old painting of a pot of geraniums, but it must have been painted here in New Mexico. At least, that’s my conviction right now. On my daily walks throughout the neighborhood where I am living in Albuquerque, I see many eye-catching settings where geraniums play a part. My own eastward-facing front porch has a pair of small orange-red specimens—some people call this color turkey red—that offer the prospect of growing to some kind of magnificence before our season ends. Summer will tell the story.

R. Harold Hollis, Albuquerque NM (May 17, 2012)