Pansies and Violas: Which Are Which, and Why So Popular?
The most enduring, and perhaps endearing, of fall-planted flowers are the pansies and violas--pansies being the ones with the charming, contrasting faces, violas the ones that are plain-faced but just as pretty.
If planted now, they will flower within weeks and keep on flowering until the first hot days of summer, maybe longer. Even if they get straggly along the way, we’ve learned of a way to bring them back. And if you’re one of the unlucky few who have had pansies die suddenly for no apparent reason, we have learned of a solution for this as well.
A Longtime Favorite
Pansies have been a part of California gardening for a long time. John McLaren, creator of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and author of one of the earliest books on California gardening, had this to say of the pansy, way back in 1908: “This popular plant is a favorite of rich and poor alike, everyone who has a garden growing a few pansies. This is deservedly so, in view of its wonderful variety of color and its free-flowering habit, together with the ease with which it may be grown.”
At this time, much attention was being given to hybridizing and crossing, with the goal being bigger and bigger flowers.
‘A Great Delight’
In 1915, E. J. Wickson noted in “California Garden Flowers” that “Pansies are a great delight if well grown from choice strains of seed, of which a number of seedsmen are making a specialty. A pansy specialist is coming to be regarded as a very high-class horticulturist.”
By 1928 these “choice strains” made the cover of at least one seed catalogue, the Los Angeles firm of Aggeleler & Musser, a considerable feat considering the competition from other flowers and vegetables. These strains had names such as Mammoth Wonder, A&M; Super Maximum and Mastodon, indicating that size was of utmost importance.
About this time, plants as well as seed began to be sold, but not in plastic pots as they’re sold today; you dug your own from fields and loaded them into wooden boxes. At Paul J. Howard’s Flowerland nursery on La Brea Avenue, plants were being sold for 50 cents a dozen, or $3 per 100.
By 1949, Better Gardens nursery in San Marino was offering “Genuine Imported Rogglie Swiss Giants,” Steele’s and a mix named Santa Anita Jumbo, which shows how far back the tradition of pansies at the Santa Anita track goes.
The culmination of all this was the strain called Majestic Giant, which won the first All-America award for pansies. According to Lew Whitney of Roger’s Gardens in Corona del Mar, it is still the best of the big-flowered, long-stemmed, pretty-faced pansies, and the most common at nurseries.
Those long stems, by the way, were developed so they could be cut, something modern gardeners seem to have forgotten. Lew remembers his mother having a special shallow bowl just for the pansies, and old seed catalogues made quite a point of it. One contemporary seed catalogue, the English firm of Thompson & Morgan (P.O. Box 1308, Jackson, N.J. 08527), still carries two cut-flower strains, Violet Queen and Yellow Queen, and the catalogue photo of these pansies tied into a little bundle ought to tempt one to try pansies as cut flowers, but you really needn’t look beyond the common Majestic Giant.
There are other strains of large-flowered pansies around, and there are even some called Steele’s, presumably descended from that old-time strain and now valued for their smaller but softer-colored flowers. There is even a mix called Race Track.
As things have a habit of doing, the pendulum is now swinging the other way, and the smaller flowered violas are coming back into fashion. One good reason is that the ancestor of all violas is a perennial and as a result, violas or “viola-flowered” pansies bloom the longest of the lot. They can even live over from year to year.
Violas are descended from Viola cornuta , but so much crossing has gone on that most violas are now a mix of pansy and viola, which is why some seed catalogues invented the term viola-flowered pansies. But you’re pretty safe if you call a plain-faced pansy a viola.
The best of these is a strain called Crystal Bowl, which is the common plain-faced pansy at nurseries, being sold as a mix or as separate colors. It is the longest-flowering of all, and flowers for what seems like forever. You are likely to tire of it before it gives up.
Clear Crystal is a similar strain. You will also find some other small-flowered violas that are always one color, such as a strain called Ruby or Ruby Queen, which is more the color of a garnet and one of the most velvety of violas.
A Distinctive Face
It is a little harder to figure out what to call some of the pansies or violas that fall somewhere between. One of these is called Bambini, and it has the cutest of all pansy faces, with distinct eyes and a smile, but they are small, viola-sized blossoms.
Beaconsfield is an interesting pansy, with the three lower petals a deep purple and the uppermost pure white. Moody Blues is striking with the upper petals colored purple and a purple face on the lower white petals.
Imperial Blue and Imperial Orange Prince have only faint faces, but they are also two of the prettiest violas or pansies, whichever they are.
You may also find some small-flowered pansies or violas that have extremely deep color and complicated markings. These are only sold in flower in small pots and they are seldom named, but I suspect they’re descendants of what used to be called “Shakespeare’s pansies,” violas with some Johnny-jump-up in them.
The Johnny-jump-up is the least civilized of the viola clan and is so easy it will naturalize in gardens (some consider it a weed). It has its own botanical name of Viola tricolor , a reference to the lilac, purple and yellow petals. A fancier Johnny-jump-up is named King Henry and is a deep, velvety purple. Two more charming flowers would be hard to find.
This by no means exhausts the list but it should help with the shopping, because the best way to buy pansies or violas--if you’re going to plant them by the dozens in the ground--is when they are small and compact, before they’ve flowered. Next Saturday we’ll share some of the secrets--old and new--of growing pansies and violas.
