Instant colour with the small-faced fillers
These delightful blooms fill us with winter and spring cheer, but which ones are best and how should we grow them? Graham Clarke has the answers.
Right now, gardens up and down the land are filled with the little smiling faces of winter pansies and violas. Their bold, cheerful, multi-coloured, easy-to-grow flowers brighten up front porches, flowerbeds, doorstep pots, winter baskets and windowboxes. And don’t forget, there are spring, summer and even autumn versions of these fantastic plants, too.
All pansies (as well as violets) are forms of viola. In fact, all of the pansies you buy from garden centres or mail order suppliers generally derive from the one garden plant, Viola × wittrockiana. During the 1800s this was bred with other species, predominately ‘heartsease’ or wild pansy (V. tricolor), and by the start of the 20th century, at least 400 named varieties were in existence as the result.
Today’s varieties are divided into categories based on flower size. Pansies have flowers around 2-3in (5-7.5cm) across, whilst violas are much smaller.
Plants of all types have been refined by plant breeders over the past 40 years or so, and have been bred to be either autumn-, winter- or spring-flowering, although several series will flower in the autumn and again in the spring.
Pansies - that all-important blotch
Some pansy hobbyists take the view that for a plant to be considered a pansy it must have a blotch (the dark velvety ‘face’ of the bloom). The viola, meanwhile, may have some markings, but these should not be so thick as to form a blotch. However, the commercial world does not see it this way, and breeders have produced many pansies without blotches. You can now see why gardeners get confused!
Pansies, well, they are bigger and blowsy, yet they can frequently keep a nice shape without flopping over. It was in the late 1970s when the first true winter pansy appeared on garden centre shelves. The ‘Universal’ pansy was mainly sold as a summer plant for flowerbeds, but it also had the ability to flower in winter – and this was hugely exciting for gardeners. More ‘Universals’ were brought out, and breeders began to concentrate their efforts on producing plants that could flower in the short, cold, and wet-and-windy days of winter.
Violas
They have overtaken pansies in terms of popularity and tend to be more compact in size, the smaller flowers are produced in far greater number, the plants are hardier with greater weather resistance, and there is currently a wider array of available colours. Certainly, the smaller the flower, the less likely it will suffer from rain splash and other blemishes that can quickly ruin a display.
Araft of colours for instant spring colour
