The three friends

The three friends. 20 November, 2025.

One evening last November I was walking up the alley and noticed that someone had chucked out some bedding plants. They lay on the gravel, out of their pots and with very little soil on their roots, but in the November gloom you could still see a flower or two, like a lost bead.  

After a couple of days I took it into my head to try and rescue them. There were two geraniums (pelargoniums I mean), one of which had shut up shop, but the other was still making a gallant effort to produce new flowers. There was also a begonia with dark red leaves, but it was so tiny and bedraggled I didn't expect much from it.

Anyway, they were company. Back home in Swindon, I potted them up and sat them on a recycling bin in my porch, where the sun sometimes reached them. 

The three friends indoors. 11 December, 2025.

Nothing much changed through the winter. They didn't die, was about the best you could say. It was a mild winter and there was little danger of frost in the back of the porch. All the same there were a few nights when I brought them inside. The induction hob seemed like the perfect spot to plonk them.

Then in April I moved back to Frome, so I passed them on to a friend with a garden. She took care of them, potted them on, kept them watered through the long dry summer. Here's what they looked like last week.

The two pelargoniums, 6 August 

Pelargonium is a southern hemisphere genus, mostly southern Africa (some in Australia). The ancestors of our garden hybrids are predominantly South African. 

Classifying the garden types is phenomenally complicated. Typical schemes involve up to twenty categories. I think both of my plants would fall into the zonal category, though only one of them shows the zonal marking on the leaves. 

It's become a blur already. The one fact I'll retain is that in Pelargonium each bunch of flower buds is considered a pseudoumbel, because the flowers don't all bloom at the same time. 

The begonia, 2 August 2026.

Begonia is one of the largest plant families. Aside from its 2,000 wild species there are endless hybrids and cultivars. 

I think this is what they call a wax begonia: plants of many different colours but all with rounded gleaming fleshy leaves and small cheerful flowers. They are grown as bedding annuals (though as my plant demonstrates they are not actually annuals).

The wax begonias (Begonia x sempervirens-cultorum) are cultivars with several species in their makeup. One of them is Begonia cucullata, native to Argentina, Brazil, etc. -- The Wikipedia entry is fairly informative.

When I did some image matching on my plant I kept hitting references to Begonia sparreana. Frustratingly, I still can't decide if there's any substance to this. 

Begonia sparreana is a plant endemic to Ecuador, rather threatened in its native habitat (moist tropical lowland forest on the Amazonian side of the Andes). From the invaluable Missouri Botanical Garden site (it's free to use, but you have to create an account) I downloaded Jorgensen and Léon-Yánez's Catalogue of the Vascular Plants of Ecuador, which is fascinating about Ecuador plant life in general, but it doesn't describe individual species, and as far as B. sparreana was concerned I wasn't much the wiser (it's on p. 318). 

Much of the internet fluff derived from the English and Spanish Wikipedia entries for B. sparreana, which both appear to show an image of a standard wax begonia just like mine, snapped in a British garden. (I couldn't find any images of B. sparreana in its native habitat.)

Do wax begonias with burgundy leaves and pink flowers have B. sparreana in their ancestry? It's tempting to dismiss it as a simple error replicated dozens of times, but I found just enough variation in my search hits to leave the matter in doubt. 

For example Casey Elizabeth Dennis has a post showing B. sparreana as a hanging basket type of begonia with small pink flowers on bright red stems (there's a picture). Different from my plant, but not so different as to rule out any connection.  Yet her lengthy post has a naggingly synthetic feel, suggesting it's mostly computer-generated. So is B. sparreana really a thing, in the horticulture world? I still don't know. 

https://plantophiles.com/plant-care/begonia-sparreana/

Afterwards I had a nightmare vision of a future in which human beings can no longer find anything out from the internet, because truth and falsehood have become inextricably tangled. Only Al can work the internet. Al can't tell the difference between true and false, but it can chew through so much data that the truth mostly lands uppermost. And true or not, there's no means of questioning it.

My SF dystopian fiction has begun!

The two pelargoniums, 10 August 2026.