I grew all of them from seed that I bought from South Africa and some from the USA.
All of these are very easy to grow and flower.

Pelargonium citronellum
(One of my favorites. The lemon scent is so strong that stays in your fingers long after you touched the leaves)



Pelargonium cotyledonis
It looks like a small tree and the flowers are beautiful








Pelargonium incrassatum (I lost this one to rot... my fault. It's easy to grow)
Summer dormant. Very beautiful species.

Pelargonium grossularioides
The plant is not very showy, the flowers are so small that you don't notice them.
If you squeeze a leave, the scent is strange, but if you smell the plant without squeezing any part of it it's definitely coconut scented




Pelargonium tomentosum
The plant is beautiful. Velvet like leaves. Hairs (tomentum) everywhere. The first year the size is OK but then it grows very large. Mint scented.










Pelargonium zonale
Attractive plant. Similar to the pelargonium hybrids. Lots of flowers.

Pelargonium odoratissimum
One of the strongest scented pelargoniums. I would say: smells like apples with a slight touch of mint.
Just walk and accidentally touch it with your foot and you will feel the smell of apples immediately.
They say it is edible, as most geraniums, and that people aromatize sugar with the leaves. I haven't tried this. Very easy to grow and lots of small flowers. Good as a hanging plant.





Pelargonium vitifolium
Beautiful plant. You can grow it as a small tree and everybody will tell you: What a nice little tree!
Very nice scent, rose-like I would say. And delicate round umbels of flowers. It can get very big if you do not prune it.








Pelargonium mollicomum
Small, bushy and nice plant. Smells like canned pineapple. Lots of flowers and seeds. Grows many, many tubers underground, so think it twice before planting it in the same pot with another plant, for even if you pull it out it regrows from the tubers. Anyway it doesn't harm the other plant if you leave it there.








Tubers

Pelargonium peltatum
It's the wild version of the ivy leaved geranium hybrids.
Beautiful flowers but the branches of this wild species tend to grow very long. I live in an apartment and my neighbour below enjoyed most of the flowers. So don't let it hang free. It's easy to grow from seed.



Pelargonium quercifolium
This oak leaved geranium smells very strange, not a pleasant smell. (yes, it smells definitely bad ) The leaves are very rough, like sandpaper. In winter (when you have more blue light and less direct sun) the center of the leaves turns brown. The flowers are beautiful and the plant is very easy to grow.








Pelargonium cucullatum
It's related to the Regal/Martha Washington geranium.
Very attractive plant. The flowers are big for a wild species (but smaller than the Regal hybrids) and the plant gives plenty of them, (generally in groups of four). It is very showy as a pot plant because it is rather compact and bushy and it is very easy to grow from seeds.

Pelargonium inquinans
This is one of the ancestors of the hybrid geraniums (Pelargonium x hortorum), the other being Pelargonium zonale). The red color of the flowers of hybrid red geraniums come from this one, while the horseshoe shaped mark comes from Pelargonium zonale.
I have seen in the web pictures of P. inquinans with flowers very similar to red geranium hybrids. The seeds I bought from S. Africa are probably from a very wild specimen: lots of inflorescenses but few flowers per umbel, and the plant grows to an enormous size. Even in a relatively small pot it reached 2 meters ( 6,5 ft) in one year. You have to prune it very hard to keep it to a manageable size and attractive. The red color is so intense in the flowers of this species... much more than that of the red hybrids. The easiest to grow of all geraniums.




Pelargonium quinquelobatum
A small plant. The flowers are very delicate... very light salmon in color (can also be whitish), small and shiny like mother of pearl. Very easy to grow and flower.

Beautiful photos, and lots of information! Thank you for sharing.

Have you added your photos to the plant database? Please do, if you haven't.

Yes, please do add your photos to the data base here.
Many of us would appreciate it.

I have grown several from seed and/or cuttings----mainly scented leaf varieties.

Pelargonium carnosum
Unfortunately this one lasted many years but died a few month ago. It looks like if some wood borer insect made it's way inside the plant. Never happened this before to any of my pelargoniums. I think I still have 2 seeds left so I'll try to sow it again. Very attractive plant due to the swollen stem.








Pelargonium capitatum
One immediately thinks of a rose scented geranium, such as P. capitatum 'Attar of Roses'. But nature had other plans for this specimen. I bought the seeds from South Africa and they were probably from a wild P. capitatum plant. The scent was very strong and really disgusting. Nothing to do with a pleasant rose scent. All the seeds of the lot produced plants with the same horrible smell. It was a hard way to learn that the scent of P. capitatum and others varies greatly among wild plants and that the scent is irrelevant to identify a species.




P. capitatum seed pod. I always spread a bit of white glue at the tip so that seeds remain attached when ripe.

Yes, I find the scents are not always what they are supposed to be. Although, I think the pelargonium capitatum that I have does smell somewhat like roses.

Nice collection, Fabian!

Do you grow geranium species native to Argentina?

Thank you Mutisia.
You are from Chile. We are neighbours!

These botanical pelargoniums are just the ones I grew from seed.
I have others that I could get the plant, such as Pelargonium sidoides 'Burgundy', Pelargonium gibbosum and others

I do not grow any plant from the genus Geranium. There are not so many species native to this part of South America.
I found a list here, some with pics: https:/www.sib.gov.ar/busqueda.php?qry=geranium&qrydo.x=0&qrydo.y=0

As you can see many of them are not native, but introduced from Europe and North America.

Many of them are not showy enough fror a garden. Many were discovered recently (1990's) such as Geranium tafiense (from the central-north part of Argentina, the province of Tucumán) and I coudn't find any pic yet.

I lived in a town in the Patagonian Andes for 12 years, and I remeber having seen many Geranium magellanicum in the forests there. The plant is very attractive. (It is also native to Chile)

But most people in Argentina do not value (or do not like) native plants.
In all these years I only saw very few native plants in the gardens there, and never a single Geranium magellanicum.

The climate there is ideal for some plants, that grow without any care, mainly:
Tulips (As they naturalize very easily there, they are everywhere, in every garden... They are beautiful, OK, but you get bored seeing them in every corner)
Roses (any kind)
Lupinus polyphyllus (from North America)

Rosa rubiginosa (you may know it as "rosa mosqueta" in Chile), from Europe, has disseminated so much that it has become a threat to native species.
Cytisus scoparius ("retama" in spanish), the same.

There are many native species from Patagonia that are really beautiful, (many are also native to Chile) but they are never used in gardens.
Geranium magellanicum is one of them.
Alstroemeria patagonica (syn. Alstroemeria aurantiaca), with very attractive yellow-orange flowers, is rather common in summer in the forests.
Fuchsia magellanica grows everywhere, except in the local gardens.
Calceolaria uniflora. This plant has spectacular flowers, it is native to southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, but never saw a single one growing in any garden.
Mutisia decurrens and other mutisias, they are very nice vines, everybody knows them, but they are never used for gardening.
Petunia patagonica. This plant is breathtaking when in flower, but again, not a single one in the gardens.
Berberis darwinii. Of these I have seen some plants in cultivation, but very few.

I think the same happens in Chile, doesn't it?
You are from the climate zone where Lapageria rosea (copihue) grows. I spoke to many people from Chile with gardens, and most of them didn't grow it, despite it being one of the showiest plants you can grow in a garden.
The same applies to Alstroemeria ligtu or Tecophilaea cyanocrocus (the Chilean blue crocus... And what a deep blue color they have!). Both spectacular and only native to Chile... but not usually seen in gardens. I once knew a guy near Santiago that had the luck to find some blue crocus plants growing wild near his home. He was very happy because these plants aren't even commercialized.
The same happens with the attractive "anyanyucas" (Rhodophiala ananuca, Rhodophiala rhodolirion, Rhodophiala bagnoldii, and many others, also indigenous from Chile).

Fabian, I live in the area SW of Santiago where the last surviving Tecophilaea c. were found, but do not have the necessary strength to climb the mountains due to severe osteo-arthritis. Some years ago, a friend that shares my love for native flora gave me a bulb he had purchased from a person that said she had imported them (yeah!) and although I loved and pampered the bulb it only flowered the first season, just some green sprouted on the second and then it was gone.

This area has been suffering drought for 10 years now. I have been living here for the last 8 years and it only gets worst. There are still lots of Alstroemeria ligtu ssp. simsii around, but the later blooming Alstroemerias I saw on previous years (A. angustifolia and A. pulcra) die back before blooming because of the dry heath.

The Mutisia species I took pictures of are from the time I still lived in Santiago and were shot in the surroundings and in the Andes mountains around the ski centers, which were of easy access for me and my car.

Unfortunately, many people here still think that plants that grow wild are noting but weeds. However, I have observed a positive change during the last 15 years or so. Especially younger people are more motivated to make photo-safari field trips .

This area (not coastal) is not appropriate to grow Copihues due to the alkaline soil and the dry heath.

I had some lovely Geranium berterianum that I grew from seeds, but they succumbed (as so many other plants) to all kinds of rodents.

Many years ago I visited Magallanes Punta Arenas and Torres del Paine, and even more years ago I visited Bariloche (gorgeous surroundings!).

This thread is fascinating, I have learned so much about pelargoniums in just a few minutes. It is interesting what you say about how native plants are not appreciated. That happens everywhere I am afraid. Recently a good friend from Santiago brought me a book, "Plantas Nativas" that, she said, featured plants from Chile. I was surprised to see that the majority of them are plants that I grow here in the southeast US.

Hi Alice!

Is one of the authors of your book Paulina Riedemann? She was a wonderful retired phisician that really traced (tracked?) the whole country with her husband (Gustavo Aldunate, also a retired phisician) that took the pictures, while she collected some seeds to grow in her garden and at the College she teached. The third person in the credits (Teiller) is a Botanist that revised the technical data. The senior couple was known for renting some mules and 'dissapearing' in thre Andes mountains for weeks, only to find plants from which they had heard, but had no picture. They did that in their senior years.

Nobody has done in recent years as much as Paulina and Gustavo to attract/interest chileans to love, respect, and know about our native flora. Their books are priceless for field trips.

I have no doubt Paulina managed to take some seeds with her to grow them in Paradise

Although my Chilean friend gave this to me saying it was plants from her country, I believe it was published in Argentina. Probably much the same in both places. I do not see the names you mentioned. I am not great at reading Spanish but I believe the author or editor is Lucia Cane.

I don´t know that author, Alice.

Chile and Argentina share a lot of native flora in the southern part of both countries and in the far south (Patagonia), where the Andes mountains that separate both countries loose altitude.

You made me curious and I will try to get that book

It appears to be part of a series, perhaps not the most informative but the pictures are good and the accompanying advice seems accurate.