(Posted on Instagram on 8th March 2021)
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What does this flower have to do with International Women’s Day, Clarks Shoes, and maybe even the suffrage movement?
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It’s a long-stemmed (handy for displaying in my porcelain vases) Hardy Geranium, called Geranium pratense ‘Mrs Kendall Clark’.  Who Mrs Clark was has long been lost to history (sounds familiar?), but thanks to a lucky discovery via the Internet today, I happened upon a reasoned argument that she was in fact Lucretia Hasseltine Kendall (1853 - 1937).
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Lucretia Hasseltine Kendall (born Kimball) was an American who married a member of the Clark shoe family. She and her husband James had met whilst studying Natural Sciences at Heidelberg University.  Around the 1930’s they were living near to the nursery of plantsman Walter Ingwerson in East Grinstead, and it’s believed Lucretia took him a sample of a native cranesbill she thought he might be interested in propagating.
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Anyway it seems he did just this, and named the variety after her, making it commercially available sometime after 1938.
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It’s a cracking plant, sometimes blue, sometimes verging on lilac, depending on the light.  I’m so glad it was collected.
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And the suffrage movement?  Well, when she lived in York Lucretia apparently spoke “entertainingly” on the subject.  What her position in the movement was is not recorded.
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My thanks to Dorset Perennials for this information.