Pansy Party

The flowers that saved my spring garden, and Brenna Estrada's new book

I know that I said that I wasn’t going to let the bulb rot disaster get me down, and yet I still have to admit that I’ve got an angry little half-written thing called “Tulip Folly” sitting in my drafts. Don’t worry—it’s staying there. Tulips have already received enough criticism this year, whether it’s in magazines, on Gardeners’ World (even Monty had words about them), or here on Substack (I especially liked this post by Arthur Parkinson). Are tulips being cancelled? Well, no, but maybe people are realizing that there’s more style than substance to such showy flowers that bloom briefly and don’t perenialize well. They can cost a lot and aren’t sustainable. They’re extravagant, and are they too extravagant? Like, in a gross way?

Don’t mind me—I’m still bitter since mine didn’t even bloom at all. The bright (or pastel, rather) show I was so looking forward to never came, even after all of the planning, potting, storing, looking after, squirrel-detterring I did from November until April. Nothing!

Fortunately I had a spring garden full of color after all, thanks to the violas and pansies I planted from seed/impulse-bought at Lowes. Which is such a funny thing because, though I’d always loved tulips I always turned up my nose at violas and pansies, thinking of them as boring bedding plants. It’s kind of a relief to me to read that Brenna Estrada, owner of Three Brothers Blooms and author of the gorgeous new book Pansies (so pretty much a pansy expert), had always viewed them in the same way.

Pansy Party: all of my seed-grown varieties, smashed into a planter together. Kind of a mess, but also kind of festive?

I’d heard about Brenna’s book for a while before it came out but didn’t know if I needed to buy it since I have way too many gardening books already. But then I came across an article by Brenna in The English Garden (btw—free to read through the Libby app for those of you in the US!) and really loved her celebration of the viola (according to Brenna, all pansies are violas but not all violas are pansies; kind of confusing honestly and I’ll leave it at that) and its, uh, populist appeal : “While it is possible to grow roses, peonies, and dahlias in pots, they must be quite large and require significant space, while the easygoing pansy does well in both small pots and larger pots . . . It is a flower that is accessible to anyone and everyone, grand garden or not.”

As a gardener with the least grand of gardens I was sold and I bought the book. The contrarian in me also loved Brenna’s quest to bring the poor, hopelessly old-fashioned pansy back into vogue. In the 19th and early 20th centuries the pansy was a thing to be celebrated, judged at garden shows, bred for long stems and unique petals. But by the middle part of the last century it fell out of favor as a cut flower and began to be seen as only a stumpy little bedding plant.

Look at the face on this little ‘Antique Laeta’ flower! (I can relate at the moment.)

And that’s what I always saw them as, too. Go to any Lowe’s and Home Depot in early spring and you’ll see long tables of violas and pansies, short-stemmed and ready to be planted out into front beds and window boxes. And I’m not saying that they’re ugly (after all I bought some pretty pale blue pansies from Lowe’s and I love them) but they’re also not the pansy of years past. Violas and pansies are easy and cheap to buy from big box stores and nurseries, but they’re also not terribly hard to grow from seed, and of course when you grow from seed you can get much more interesting varieties.

The first viola I grew from seed was Antique Laeta, sown last September (or was it October?) and over-wintered in plastic bins. Is it worth it to sow violas from seed, I wondered, when violas are so easy to buy? Yes! Absolutely. This specific variety is so small and dainty, its blooms looking like little upturned faces wearing horrified expressions. Lovely!

Pots and pots of ‘Antique Shades’

Oh, but Nature Antique Shades. This is the one that did it for me. In January I bought some seeds off of Etsy and sowed them right away, worried it might be too late. But the plants right now are larger and producing more flowers than the other varieties I grew from seed. Long stems, very vigorous, frilly little flowers that go all sorts of colors: sometimes red and fading into pink, yellowy peach with mauve whiskers. Very nice. Did I mention that they also smell wonderful?

In her book Brenna introduces us to other unique pansy/viola varieties, many of them hard to find. Brenna sells some gorgeous ones in her seed shop, but it looks like they sell out fast; remind me to get on the mailing list.

Do you see that rose?!

I love violas in a bud vase, but had always overlooked them when it came to larger arrangements. Was it because the stems were so short or because I just never considered a viola to be a real cut flower? Brenna encourages using pansies and violas in arrangements, even in large ones. OK, so maybe I can’t use my tiny ‘Antique Laetas,’ but the ‘Nature Antique Shades’ are plenty big enough to flit around the top of a vase. The secret is that you just have to cut them at the base of a stalk to get a longer stem. Not always the easiest thing to do, I know, as it involves cutting off little baby buds and stems, but these things grow fast, so just cut them!

My own viola arrangement is pretty small. I still don’t have a lot of flowers in my garden at the moment, though I do have roses. Queen of Sweden somehow shot up fast and beat Carding Mill to the punch. (The first blooms are always kind of scrunched and weird-looking; I think it’s the aphids, but oh well. They go away.) So I added some roses to my mini arrangement and I put in alyssum (I have a ton of that) and I put in a sprig of honesty that has started to go to seed. It’s not a good arrangement by any means (I threw it together while talking on the phone) but I have to agree with Brenna that violas really work well combined with other flowers. I mean, this arrangement has roses in it, and yet I still think that ‘Antique Shades’ is the star of the show.

But you don’t even need to cut violas in order to enjoy them inside. Sometimes I’ll take in a pot or two to put on the table for a few days, and when they start to droop I just get them back out into the garden. I mean, you could do the same thing with a little pot of tulips, I know. But the tulips will only last for a week or two, while the violas will go on blooming and blooming. They don’t love the high heat of summer, but last year mine still bloomed anyway, fading so light that I could hardly remember the variety. In fall they perked back up, and by December I still had flowers. Try picking tulips in December!