PATRICK MCDUFFEE believes that everyone should have at least one scented geranium on their windowsill year-round, for an on-demand invigorating whiff of fragrance, or to admire its colorful flowers—or to make a homebrewed cup of herbal tea from its leaves. Patrick is the third generation of his family to cultivate scented geraniums at Well-Sweep Herb Farm in rural New Jersey, where 80-something Pelargonium varieties are among some 2,000 different kinds of herb plants in the nursery’s amazing collection.

Well-Sweep Herb Farm is a popular destination nursery in Port Murray, N.J., founded in 1969 by Cyrus and Louise Hyde, which today has more than 6 acres of themed gardens to explore. Patrick, who is nursery manager, is one of three generations of the extended Hyde family who continue to bring Well-Sweep to life, including his grandmother and his uncle, David Hyde, who runs the business.

Each garden season Well-Sweep hosts a couple of free, weekend-long festivals, with the next one—its Fall Flower Festival and Craft Market—set for Aug. 30 and 31, with lots of expert talks and tours and more, including what Patrick is calling a “Scented Geranium Deep Dive” that’s he’s offering.

Read along as you listen to the Aug. 18, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here). (Photo of Patrick McDuffee below by David Frant.)

scented geraniums, with patrick mcduffee

Margaret Roach: How is it out there in herb world, Patrick [laughter]?

Patrick McDuffee: We are experiencing a drought at the moment and watering as much as we can.

Margaret: Yes, it’s madness. This has been a year of challenges. Definitely. Definitely. Well, I so enjoyed working together on our recent “New York Times” garden column that we did about Well-Sweep and about the scented geraniums and so forth. The 80-something scented geraniums are like a collection within the bigger collection of the nursery. You have deep groups of a number of other plants, too—there are other specialties.

Patrick: There’s 50 different types of mint and 60 different types of lavender. I’m just guess-timating. There’s probably 200 different varieties of thyme, 40 or so different types of rosemary, 20 to 30 oreganos. So yeah, any one of those herbs, there’s a massive collection. And then on top of that, there’s a large amount of medicinal herbs for our herbalists in the region. We do a lot with the American Herbalist Guild here locally, and lots of natives and other rare plants and antique plants.

Margaret: And then I think that as if that’s not enough, I think maybe you and maybe your uncle, too, enjoy carnivorous plants [above]. Is that correct? Is that another specialty now?

Patrick: It is. That has become a specialty. When I came over a decade ago now from James Madison University, I used to work in a tissue-culture lab as an intern, where I got to cut up Venus flytraps in test tubes under sterile conditions. And when I came here, my grandfather had one fish tank in the back with a collection of things that he had collected, and I knew how to go in there with a scalpel.

And we do a lot of terrariums in living sphagnum moss, and I can almost recreate lab-like conditions in that stuff, so full of antibiotics and antifungals and rooting hormones, that I was able to slice and dice and start selling a few. And then my uncle, who runs the business, saw that people were into it and he expanded the collection even larger.

Margaret: And he’s a native-plant enthusiast, I think, David Hyde; isn’t he as well?

Patrick: He is. And a lot of those are all native. So that’s one of the reasons he really, really got into it is because he could add every single one of these to his native lectures or his funky plant lectures.

Margaret: And so as if that were not enough, then you also inherited from your grandfather, I believe, a lot of roosters with very long tails [laughter].

Patrick: Yes, I did. They are the closest thing we have to Onagadori [a Japanese breed] here in the U.S. and yes, I inherited his flock. And I did a lot of genetics classes that were originally inspired by understanding all the genetics of these particular roosters. And so now I breed them and sell them all over the country now.

Margaret: Yeah, just a few little passions, huh, for diversity? [Laughter.] So I think your grandfather, Cyrus Hyde—from whom by the way, decades ago I used to mail-order a lot of plants for my garden, so I’ve known Well-Sweep a long time—I think he sort of handed down the scented-geranium gene to you, Patrick. I think he gave you a scented geranium when you were a teenager, maybe?

Patrick: I think I was probably 16 or 17 when I got my first rose geranium, which he taught me to train into a topiary. And we’ve talked about rose geranium, how it’s relatively tolerant of many conditions compared to some of the other ones. And so I moved almost every year of college to a different dorm room, different apartment, and it managed to live on some northeastern-facing window sills, some east, some west. And it managed to come up with me to the farm for quite a few years until I over-zealously root-pruned and top-pruned it at the same time one year, a little bit too much tough love, and I killed it. But I’ve gotten better at the art of topiary since then, so the two that I have recreated in its stead are much nicer than the original.

Margaret: But the ‘Old-Fashioned Rose’ was your first scented geranium, and I think it has many uses as do many of the scented geraniums—and as do many of the herbs in your collection, other things, too. What else? You can make tea. I think you can even use it sort of when you go out as bug repellent. Don’t you use it for other things as well?

Patrick: Oh yeah, absolutely. If I feel like going on a hike tonight, I will grab a couple of leaves and rub my shins down and leave them in my sock and it stops the ticks from coming up my legs. And if you look at an organic tick repellent, you can look at the ingredient list and it will always have Pelargonium graveolens [above] in there as well.

I’m about to shape-prune my topiaries, probably tonight or tomorrow night. And I will be taking some cuttings of them, but then taking off all the broad leaves and handing them to my grandmother to do a multitude of rose geranium cakes that I will be featuring in a lot of my tea courses, both at the festival and in the fall as a little tea accompaniment. And I’ll also probably use it in my tea courses as well.

Margaret: Yeah, even just that one, even just the rose, which is a familiar scent among the scented geraniums… And we should say they are Pelargoniums, so I think they’re from various areas in Southern Africa originally, and the range of scents is pretty staggering. I mean most people know about the rose and the citrus, for instance, but wow; I mean that’s not even a drop in the bucket [laughter].

Patrick: Not at all. People are most familiar with either that or what goes by mosquito plant or citronella plant, which we call ‘Citrosa’ here. We have another one we call ‘Citronella,’ which is what I would argue is the true citronella with a much better fragrance to it, with a much more circular leaf. And then, yes, it goes everywhere from black pepper to southernwood to some oakleaf types that smell indistinctly like wood, or some that smell like Parmesan cheese, even, or lime or lemon or oranges or strawberries.

So I often have a kid come up to me and I say, “What’s your favorite flavor?” [Laughter.] It doesn’t always work; sometimes they’ll say something really obscure, but most of the time I can be like, O.K., and then I’ll reach down and grab a scented geranium of that flavor and have them smell it.

Margaret: A way to get kids to engage with plants for sure is to amaze them like that, right?

Patrick: Yeah.

Margaret: Just among the sort of minty ones, there’s ‘Chocolate Mint’ and ‘Peppermint’ and all kinds of-

Patrick: Yeah, Peppermint is a very popular one with a very fuzzy lower growth habit and a large fuzzy leaf. ‘Chocolate Mint’ is similar to it, a little more upright, with a good red center to the leaf. There’s ‘Peppermint Spice,’ another one of my favorite ones, with a nice almost skeleton rose look to it with a nice upright growth habit. I once made a topiary out of that one, and the mint flavors continue to go on. There’s ‘Mint Rose’ and ‘Variegated Mint Rose,’ which my grandmother likes. [Above, a Pelargonium pruned as a topiary.]

Margaret: And when you want to do tea, do you just pinch off some leaves and put them in the cup and pour some hot water over it? Is it as simple as that, or is there something else? You don’t dry them or-

Patrick: I don’t dry them. You could dry them, but I really love a fresh-cut tea, so I will use fresh herbs as much as I possibly can, or accent a dried herb with a fresh herb. And usually I do a little bit of shape-pruning, so I like to make art out of my herbs. And a pruning opportunity presents itself every time I want to make a cup of tea.

Margaret: It’s a harvest too, right [laughter]?

Patrick: So if I have one branch that’s going kind of in the wrong direction or a little bit too tall, that’s kind of asking me to make a cup of tea. And I’ll take just maybe the top three leaves as a sprig per cup.

Margaret: Yeah, I mean I think there’s even a coconut one, did I read in the catalog, and a vanilla one?

Patrick: Coconut would be the weed of the Pelargonium family, and it will sometimes reseed itself in our garden. Very low-growing, but very distinctly coconut. And it’s definitely one of the landrace varieties from Africa. So is the rose geranium. And yes, there is ‘French Vanilla.’

‘Old Spice’ geranium used to be our top-seller in the fragrance world until just, I think it was two years ago, one of our volunteers, his name’s Greg, and he is a geranium fanatic and he helps us maintain the collection just for his own fun now that he’s retired. And he helped introduce the ‘French Vanilla’ and the ‘Black Pepper’ about two years ago, and they have both become two of our favorites.

Margaret: Cool. And I know there are other Pelargoniums that we in gardening called the fancy-leaf geraniums, as opposed to the scented geraniums, but some of these scented ones have some pretty beautiful leaves. You were just talking, for instance, about some of the peppermint ones having kind of very fuzzy, silvery leaves. They’re ornamental, and some of them have very dissected kind of leaves, and some are grayish and some are variegated. And so they are not unshowy, even though they’re not technically the fancy-leaf geraniums. [Above and top of page, variegated-leaf ‘Charmay’s Snow Flurry.’]

Patrick: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you could subdivide these into those that are bred for their flowers, or those that are bred for their fragrance, or those that are bred for their foliage. And there’s a lot of beautiful variegated forms that have the most gorgeous foliage on them if that’s what you’re into. Or there are some that have some of the most gorgeous scarlet or red flowers or just are very floriferous and will bloom and bloom and bloom. So it’s really about what you want out of your geranium. That’s why I say there’s a geranium for everybody. So many different uses for them.

Margaret: And that’s why you have 80-something [laughter].

And so speaking of variegated, I believe your grandfather bred some sort of lemony-scented ones that have some bi-color kind of stuff going on or whatever.

Patrick: ‘Lemon Crispum’ geranium is the Victorian one known as the finger bowl geranium, and it’s a great lemon fragrance with a really tight small leaf, and they’ll float those leaves on a bowl of water during Victorian times to rinse their fingers as they ate. Anyways, he found maybe 30 years ago a sport on one branch with a golden edge, and he named that ‘Well-Sweep Golden,’ and that hyper-mutated again another decade or so later, for a very beautiful golden edge, which he named ‘Cy’s Sunburst.’ And that one has really gotten popular to the point now where he never patented anything so anyone could propagate it, but it definitely made its way all over the U.S. and beyond. I know that he’s had friends in Russia and China that have reached out to him via letter and say, “Hey, Cy, we’ve got your plant over here.” [Above, a ‘Cy’s Sunburst’ Pelargonium standard, with a ‘Pansy’ scented geranium, plus Kiwi the cat.]

Margaret: And what you’re describing when there’s a sport, when something just occurs on one part of a plant and then you say hmmm, maybe that can make a new variety—this is not a quick process. This is no get-rich-quick scheme [laughter] whether you patent it or not, is it? I mean, it takes a while. I think you’re doing this, too, yourself.

Patrick: I am. And it depends on the sport. Some sports, like in peaches, peach trees will go from fuzzy to not fuzzy all the time. And you can clone that branch that you want and make a fuzzy or a fuzzless peach.

And the same thing happens in the geranium world. You can have a sport variegate, and the more variegated something is, the less chlorophyll it has, and the more difficult of a cutting it is to take. So yes, I think my grandfather probably got…he’s got good energy, so he probably got them to root right away, but have one that is an all-gold sport of his ‘Cy’s Sunburst’ and it is very sensitive to light and improper watering. So it, it’s taken me a couple of trial and errors to keep it going.

Margaret: So it’s a multi-year process for sure to begin to get some cuttings to then build up some stock plants to then dot, dot, dot, I mean, right?

Patrick: You never want to keep all your eggs in the same basket. Chicken analogies.

Margaret: Yeah. Well, you know something about chickens [laughter]. But it’s really remarkable because again, we could choose them for, as I said, the introduction, for their flowers [above, the blooms of ‘Mrs. Kingsley.’]. We could choose them because we want to just have something on the windowsill that we can put our hand on and get a whiff of this intoxicating fragrance and be just invigorated and just feel good, even in sort of the shut-in season of the winter, and have one of these incredible fragrances. Or to make tea and so forth.

So I said they’re from Southern Africa, so they’re not hardy in most of the United States. Clearly these are tender plants. I guess they’re perennials in their homelands, in their native haunts. So what’s the way that one makes a longtime partnership with a scented geranium?

Patrick: So I like to do them in containers because I know they’re not going to winter over, though we do plant them out in our garden. Or some people like to plant them out in window boxes. If you want to let them die as an annual, that is your own prerogative, but if you want to make a long-term friend of it, they like their own container; plant it alone, and turn them into an art project.

They all have different growth habits. So some of them can be very trainable if you’re into topiary like I am, or can be left to their own sprawling habit, in which case they can dangle over a pot, almost like a hanging basket, really beautifully. Or some of them have smaller leaves and they can turn into almost like little miniature bonsais. And they all bloom, even the ones that have delicious fragrance. So if you don’t prune it, you will often get flowers on the terminal branches.

Margaret: So the pinching and so forth that we might be doing is going to deter bloom.

Patrick: I rarely see flowers on my rose geranium topiaries, except for in February when I haven’t pruned it in a long time and it’s in the greenhouse away from the wind, so it can get kind of leggy without falling over. And I will sometimes get flowers just as I’m about to take some cuttings and I’ll be like, “Oh man, but it’s so beautiful. I guess I’ll just let it bloom for a little while before I trim it.”

Margaret: So if I have them in pots and I’ve had them in my garden, and it gets to be—well, we’re in the Northeast, both of us, so it gets to be sometime in September-October.

Patrick: They can’t get the frost, so they have to be moved in before the frost.

Margaret: Okay. And I’m looking for a sunny windowsill.

Patrick: Yes. General rule I teach my waterers is that the smaller the leaf on a geranium, the more sunny and dry it needs it.

Margaret: Okay.

Patrick: So if you were into some of the crispum geraniums we were just talking about, or some of the fragrans varieties, like the ‘French Vanilla,’ they definitely want a south-facing, southeast-, southwest-facing windowsill. And a lot of the larger varieties can be more tolerant of an east- or a west-facing windowsill.

Margaret: Because they have more leaf real estate, so to speak, to do photosynthesis?

Patrick: I guess; they can handle more water. They’re less likely to be over-watered with less light. I teach people with less light means less water. So if you don’t have prime real estate on the south-facing window, just don’t water it as much on your east-facing window. These geraniums are from Africa, and they can handle very arid soil, so you really want to let them get nice and dry in between a good, heavy drink.

Margaret: So I’ve got it on my window. So I brought it in; it spent summer outside in the garden, but then I brought my pot in and I’ve placed it in the sunniest place I can give it, especially the ones that have the smaller leaves, and I’m not going to overwater. And we spend the winter together. Do I pinch during the winter or do I just leave it alone or-?

Patrick: I would leave it alone.

Margaret: Leave it alone. Let it do its thing.

Patrick: Yeah. If it’s too big to come in, you need to do a little bit of shape-pruning before you make it to the windowsill because you’ve got an obsessive collection like I do [laughter], then you might need to trim off some of the side branches, so you can fit some other pots around it.

But besides that, don’t do pruning over the wintertime. And the reason is because it’s not getting enough light. So you’ll see your plant kind of get longer internodes through the wintertime, and get a little bit leggy. And I just like to let them do their thing. And your goal is to get them to make it through the wintertime. And the only time I trim them through the wintertime is when I’m making tea [laughter] on a couple of the branches that are getting a little bit too leggy.

But the reason that I don’t want people to prune it too much over the wintertime is because when you prune, you stimulate more growth on the base. And the winter growth is going to be leggy. So I don’t like to stimulate that new growth by pruning it until we hit the springtime. So when I’m ready to take it out in maybe May, hopefully by Mother’s Day in our area I can take it outside right after our last frost, and I can give it a shape-prune. And by doing that and then putting it in the full sun, all that new growth that comes will be much tighter and a lot stronger and a lot more stable for when we get all that wind later in the year.

Margaret: Are we repotting? Are we root-pruning? Are we doing anything else?

Patrick: As above, so below. So if you’re going to trim the top, you should probably prune on the bottom as well.

Margaret: Okay. So the two being related should be comparable. And fast-draining soil, fertilizer-?

Patrick: Well-draining soil. They can handle sandy, almost cactus-like soil, but they also do just fine in a rich soil as long as you avoid words like “moisture control,” because they don’t want their moisture controlled. They want to be well-draining. So I just look for natural potting mixes, things that have bark and perlite in them, mix a little granular fertilizer in there.

Do a nice clean cut. So something people learn, almost all gardeners learn, is to break up the soil with their hands and break up the roots with their hands. And I discourage almost everyone from doing that from a plant from Well-Sweep Herb Farm, because it’s in good soil. That’s something you do when you are trying to rescue a plant that has—I won’t talk bad on anybody, but if you get plant that’s planted in bad soil that’s been on a fertilizer drip, it wants to be bare-rooted from that nutrient-poor soil and repotted. But if you have a nice healthy plant, use a nice clean knife and just slice off a couple of sides.

Margaret: Okay. Reduce the root of the root ball a little bit.

Patrick: Yes. Reduce the size of the root ball and then replanting some new soil around the edges. You don’t need to get all aggressive with the root system.

Margaret: I just wanted to ask about Aug. 30 and 31, the festival.

Patrick: Yes. Our Fall Flower Festival where we have lots of guest speakers coming to talk on butterflies and birds and bitters and making of gin-

Margaret: [Laughter.] And mushrooms.

Patrick: Yes. Smugtown Mushrooms out of New York will be coming down here to do a couple of talks each day as well.

Margaret: They’re great. And so it’s really like, I mean, people can sign up for various things. There’s stuff going on Saturday and Sunday at all different hours that you’re doing.

Patrick: There’s no signups. It’s free. You can just walk in and come to classes.

Margaret: Oh, you don’t have to register in advance.

Patrick: Correct. We will have some classes. Smugtown will be coming back to do some classes. All of our herbalists will be doing classes through the fall. I will be doing some tea courses through the fall, so they’ll be able to come here and get our schedule and look at the classes in the future. But this day is all free.

Margaret: Oh, great. So it’s just walk in and partake. Wow, that’s incredible. And enjoy the six acres of gardens as well.

Patrick: Yep. Plenty of gardens, and lots of vendors and farm animals.

Margaret: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know how you do it. It’s a lot. You’ve got a lot going on over there [laughter].

Patrick: It’s a labor of love for sure.

Margaret: Yeah. And it’s so beautiful that the three generations are there together, loving it. I think that’s what makes it so special. It’s a beautiful story, and I’m so glad to have met you, and I’m glad to talk to you again. So thank you so much.

(Photos from Well-Sweep Herb Farm, used with permission.)

more from well-sweep herb farm

• Well-Sweep’s 2025 fall festival event
• Well-Sweep’s Facebook page
• Well-Sweep on Instagram
• Well-Sweep’s website

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 16th year in March 2025. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Aug. 18, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).