Many of my neighbors have pansies and violas on their porches right now.\u00a0 So do I.\u00a0 The only difference is that some of mine overwintered there.\u00a0 Now they will go out into the garden, joining some of their newly acquired kinfolk in the job of brightening up the beds, while the parade of daffodils, hyacinths and squills march by in seasonal array.<\/p>\n
Once in the beds, those pansies and violas will gaze thoughtfully at their much-smaller, common purple or purple and white violet cousins, currently dotting the lawn and camping out in less-tended garden areas.\u00a0 Men in my neighborhood tend to curse these ordinary wood violets as lawn invaders, but I find them charming.\u00a0 Of course, I don\u2019t care if the lawn looks like a putting green, either, but that is another story.\u00a0 Pansies and violets\u2014either invited or uninvited\u2014are signs of hope in my book and most of us need all the hope we can get.<\/p>\n
Pansies, violas and common garden violets all belong to the large violet or Violaceae family, which includes about 22 genera and countless species, hybrids and cultivated varieties.\u00a0 The name \u201cpansy\u201d is derived from \u201cpenser\u201d or \u201cpensee\u201d, French words for \u201cto think\u201d and \u201cthought\u2019 respectively.\u00a0 Modern pansies tend to look especially thoughtful because of the configuration of colored blotches and lines or whiskers on their flowery \u201cfaces\u201d.<\/p>\n
What is the difference between the \u201cpansies\u201d in your beds and containers and the \u201cviolas\u201d?\u00a0 First of all, all pansies are violas\u2014members of the violet family\u2014but not all violas are pansies.\u00a0 For practical purposes, pansies are the large-flowered plants, available in an extremely wide range of shades, from white to near black, and an impressive array of color patterns.\u00a0 Some have whiskers, some have blotches and still others have no whiskers, blotches or patterns at all, instead boasting single-colored flowers of great magnificence.<\/p>\n
The violet story, of course, has been going on for millennia, but some of the more interesting chapters started with a wild violet, Viola tricolor, also known as the European wild violet, \u201cJohnny Jump-Up\u201d or, more romantically \u201cheartsease\u201d.\u00a0 These are small perennials, somewhere between the size of a common lawn violet and a commercial viola, depending on growing conditions.\u00a0 Johnny Jump-Ups are generally yellow and purple, with the yellow color on the bottom two or three petals.\u00a0 I remember them from my childhood home in western New York State, where they came up unbidden every spring in the backyard, remnants, most likely, of some long-forgotten garden bed.<\/p>\n
The little Johnny Jump-Up came to the attention of several noble English garden enthusiasts in the early nineteenth century, and they in turn, encouraged their estate gardeners to cross Viola tricolor with other violet genera, including the Russian Viola lutea and the large-flowered Eurasian violet, Viola altaica.\u00a0 The end product of all this experimentation was Viola x wittrockiana, the forbear of the modern large-flowered pansy.\u00a0 The pansy caught on and by 1833, an estimated 400 named pansy varieties were available to gardeners.\u00a0 Shortly thereafter, hybridizers perfected the more petite plants we know now as garden violas.\u00a0 We are not quite as crazy about pansies and violas as our Victorian predecessors, but we still buy millions of them every spring and, in the South, in the fall.\u00a0 Mostly we treat them as annuals, but under the right circumstances\u2014such as an open winter on my back porch\u2014they will survive winter\u2019s ravages and return in the spring.<\/p>\n
Despite their beauty, neither pansies nor violas have any fragrance.\u00a0 For that you have to find Viola odorata, native to parts of Europe, Africa and Asia.\u00a0 These violets, which bear the common violet form, have long been used for perfumes and florists\u2019 specimens.\u00a0 Cultivated varieties became popular about the same time that the flashy wittrockianas were making their debut\u2014the early nineteenth century.\u00a0 Many varieties were available and you can still find some of them, like the dark purple \u2018Queen Charlotte\u2019.\u00a0 Planted in a lightly shaded garden bed or container, they will perennialize nicely.<\/p>\n
Sometimes confused with Viola odorata, the tender, scented Parma violet, has also been popular for centuries as a specimen plant and a source of florists\u2019 flowers.\u00a0 Modern DNA testing will eventually clarify its murky genetic origins, but it clearly came from a warm winter climate.\u00a0 Parmas saw the light of day in Naples in the sixteenth century and became popular.\u00a0 An Italian count, by the name of Brazza, reportedly did some breeding work with the plants in the nineteenth century, but the documentation is lost in the sands of time.\u00a0 Parma violets are opulent, with double blooms, which probably endeared them to Josephine, wife of Napoleon, who reportedly grew them in her fabled garden at Malmaison.\u00a0 Perhaps ironically, one of the best known Parmas, \u2018Duchess de Parme\u2019, was allegedly named for Napoleon\u2019s widow, Marie Louise, who became Duchess of Parma.\u00a0 No matter whether your affections lie with the tragic Josephine, the slightly less tragic Marie Louise, or the perpetually ambitious Napoleon, you can rest assured that they were all fond of violets.\u00a0 Fortunately it is still possible to buy Parma violets from specialty retailers if you have a greenhouse in which to raise them.<\/p>\n
So this spring, as every year, I celebrate the pansies and violas in my pots and beds and generally buy more than I should.\u00a0 I watch underfoot for white and bi-colored common violets in the lawn.\u00a0 One of these days, I will also revert to my childhood and plant some Johnny Jump-Ups.\u00a0 Life may be uncertain from time to time, but violas remain constant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Many of my neighbors have pansies and violas on their porches right now.\u00a0 So do I.\u00a0 The only difference is that some of mine overwintered there.\u00a0 Now they will go out into the garden, joining some of their newly acquired kinfolk in the job of brightening up the beds, while the parade of daffodils, hyacinths … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2],"tags":[1616,1613,1617,1618,1615,1614,31],"class_list":["post-2097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","tag-johnny-jump-up-wittrockiana","tag-pansies","tag-viola-history","tag-viola-odorata","tag-viola-tricolor","tag-violaceae","tag-violas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2098,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2097\/revisions\/2098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}