Pelargonium cordifolium (heart-leaved pelargonium)

Found near the coast in the Southern and Eastern Cape areas of South Africa.

An upright, or sometimes spreading, shrub, up to 1.5 m high and wide. The main stem is woody at the base with many branches. The leaves are heart-shaped, dark green, soft, hairy, approximately 5 cm in diameter and toothed at the margins. The flowers are pink or purple with darker veining on the petals; they are produced in branched clusters from around June to January in its native habitat (March to July in Britain).

Illustration of Pelargonium cordifolium by Sydenham Edwards in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (1792).

Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (Editor: Martyn Rix) provides an international forum of particular interest to botanists and horticulturists, plant ecologists and those with a special interest in botanical illustration.

Now well over two hundred years old, the Magazine is the longest running botanical periodical featuring colour illustrations of plants. Each four-part volume contains 24 plant portraits reproduced from watercolour originals by leading international botanical artists. Detailed but accessible articles combine horticultural and botanical information, history, conservation and economic uses of the plants described.

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Pelargonium cordifolium makes an attractive ornamental plant.

Heart-leaved pelargonium is cultivated as an outdoor ornamental in South Africa. In Great Britain it needs the protection of a greenhouse and is easily grown in sandy soil. The tips should be pinched out to maintain a bushy plant. Propagation is mainly by cuttings.

Pelargonium cordifolium can be seen growing in the dry climate section of the Princess of Wales Conservatory.

Francis Masson was the first plant collector officially employed by Kew, and was sent to Cape Town by Joseph Banks in 1772. With Carl Thunberg, another botanist, he undertook three plant-collecting expeditions in the Eastern Cape, which produced numerous exciting plants subsequently introduced to cultivation in Britain, including P. cordifolium and many other species of pelargoniums.

Although the Spanish botanist Antonio Cavanilles originally described this plant as Geranium cordifolium in 1787, it was William Curtis who first published a description of it in 1792, in his Botanical Magazine (later Curtis’s Botanical Magazine), under the name Pelargonium.

Search Kew's databases for more information on this species

The British Pelargonium and Geranium Society

Plantzafrica – Pelargonium cordifolium

Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (Wiley-Blackwell)