Calle de los Geranios

The name honours a flower with no heroic biography: the geranium, the shrub of red, pink or white petals that hangs from half of Madrid the moment the heat arrives. La calle de los Geranios belongs to a handful of streets in Ventilla-Almenara named after plants and flowers, neighbour to calle de las Magnolias and calle de las Aguileñas, a modest stretch of less than a hundred metres. The plant does carry a well-travelled story. What we call the geranium reached Europe from the far south of Africa, near Cape Town, where a naturalist gathered several specimens in the late seventeenth century. From the Netherlands it spread to balconies and courtyards across the continent, and a French botanist ended up grouping them under the name Pelargonium, for the resemblance of its fruit to a stork’s beak. Little memory of that southern origin remains as you walk through la Ventilla. What stays is the name on the plaque and, on some windowsill, the flower that gave it its title.