cover image Geranium

Geranium

Kasia Boddy. Reaktion (Univ. of Chicago, dist.), $18 (208p) ISBN 978-1-78023-048-1

This is one of two books inaugurating the publisher's Botanical series, which combines horticultural and cultural history in a small volume focused on a single species. Boddy (Boxing: A Cultural History) traces the geranium from its African birthplace to its ubiquitous presence in Western art, literature, culture, and, of course, gardens. Boddy, a lecturer in English at Cambridge University, is at her best when describing the lowly plant's cultural significance. A rose may always be a rose, but in Boddy's far-ranging survey, the geranium is, at different times, a pregnant symbol, a potent talisman, a Proustian prompt, and an agent of social reform. In the 19th-century garden, geraniums were a form of conspicuous consumption, the owner's status being announced by the number of bedded plants. In a survey that weaves together the aesthetic theories of Goethe and Ruskin, the literary works of Dickens and T.S. Eliot, the paintings of C%C3%A9zanne and the gardens of Monet, Boddy reminds us that complex meaning and history that can be contained in the most common of garden flowers. 88 color plates, 24 halftones. (Feb.)