BACKYARD BUDS

Tasting wines one day a few years ago in Alsace, I found myself transported back to childhood. I was sniffing a glass of dry muscat at the time. Now, muscat is one of the most distinctive of wine grapes, with an unmistakable aroma. The old joke goes that it smells like musk and like the cat-but the truth is that its fragrance is very attractive, simultaneously fruity, herbaceous and spicy.

In the bouquet of this particular muscat, I found hints of sour green grapes, freshly mowed grass and cloves. But there was something else there, too. It took me a minute to figure it out. Then, suddenly, it came to me: Somewhere in the aroma of this muscat, I smelled geraniums.

I grew up with geraniums in Holmby Hills. We had a big backyard, with a rose garden running along one end, and separating the roses from a stretch of pavement was a thick, clumpy geranium border. I trod carefully in the rose garden, learning at an early age not to mess with those pretty barb-stemmed flowers. But the geraniums were fair game. My sister and I practically lived in the geraniums. We tromped through them, hid (or lost) toys in them, pretended they were jungles full of tiny beasts. We scattered their pretty little pink and red and white petals around the yard. We broke their blooms off by the stems and stuck them in Coke bottles for our imaginary parties. We probably ate them. And we certainly learned to know the scent of their leaves-pungent, musty, vaguely metallic, vaguely lemony.

A lot of us grew up with geraniums, I suspect. They-re one of the most popular bedding plants in the world and are common in window boxes and little patio pots in most temperate corners of the planet. They’re as ubiquitous as bougainvillea in Southern California and nearly as colorful (and they don’t have thorns). They come in a variety of hues, including not just white, pink and red, but also salmon, scarlet and lavender, with leaves sometimes so elaborately variegated that they suggest baroque tracery. Best of all, geraniums are low-maintenance flowers. They transplant easily, they don’t need much water and it takes real extremes of heat or cold to really bother them. As my sister and I proved, they’re nearly indestructible.

About the only thing wrong with geraniums is that they’re not really geraniums at all. The true geranium is a wild herb of the species Geranium, from the family Geraniaceae-an attractive but small-blossomed plant also known as cranebill, for its elongated, beak-shaped seed pods. (The word geranium comes from the Greek geranos, meaning crane.)

There are more than 300 species of Geranium, including a number that are native to the British Isles and to North America. But what we call geraniums are not among them. Our geraniums are members of another genus of the Geraniaceae clan, Pelargonium. Pelargoniums come from southern Africa and were introduced to the Northern Hemisphere, to England, in the early 17th century. They apparently reminded the English of wild geraniums, and the next thing anyone knew-the old “they-re spicy like pepper, so let’s call them peppers” routine-geraniums is what they had become.

These geraniums reached America in the mid-18th century and soon blanketed the country. Perhaps because of their dependability, they became symbols of hearth and home, and they were often loaded onto covered wagons or trains headed west. “They reach perfection,” Sunset magazine once claimed, “in the foggy coastal belt along the Pacific Coast.”

But nobody loved geraniums as much as the Victorians back in England, and it was they who hybridized them to improve their color and hardiness, producing the vivid, durable plants we know today. The Victorians also started playing around with how the things smelled. Nowadays, there are scented-leaf geraniums that, when gently brushed, release the perfume of lemons, roses, pine trees, peppermint, apple, cinnamon and more. A friend of mine in New York swears that her neighbor grows a geranium on his Manhattan rooftop that smells like fried chicken-though I wonder if that might have something to do with the air shaft.

Personally, I like geraniums that smell like geraniums. The kind I detected in that Alsatian muscat. And in case you think I’m just being poetic when I talk about geraniums in wine, I should mention that I’ve since learned why I made that sensory connection: Geraniol, a chemical compound found in geranium leaves, is also one of the odorous constituents of muscat essences. Like I said, geraniums are everywhere.