By Ann Coker

I used to spend the summers with my grandmother in Goodwater, Alabama, a small rural community in Coosa County. Everyone in the community raised flowers and had a garden. My grandmother loved planting flowers and gardening in her beautiful large landscaped yard. At one time she had an extensive garden (including a “grape vineyard”) where she raised produce for the family store. She had multiple types of fruit trees in her yard. Any type of fruit tree she did not have someone in the community did have. We spent the long summer days canning fruit and vegetables and making jelly. Except for the dead of winter, her yard always had something blooming. Most of the time she would raise her own bedding plants in her greenhouse. But as she aged, she slowly cut back on her gardening and started going to the community plant nursery, Jacobs Flowers, for flowering bedding plants to fill the bare spaces in her flower beds. The first time I went with her to the nursery she told me she would buy me a bedding flowering plant that I could plant. I had never been to a plant nursery and was amazed at all the rows of both flowering and non-flowering plants displayed outside and inside the large white buildings with large side and roof windows. One building was smaller and cooler than the rest. In this building, I found the flower I wanted to plant, a purple-blue flower that looked like it had a smiling face. It was a pansy. My grandmother discouraged me from buying this flower to plant because she said it would not do well outside because it was not the right time to plant it. She told me that it was too hot and that no matter how much I watered it, it would not survive the summer heat. But I insisted: we bought the plant and despite my best efforts my pansy only survived two weeks.

Pansies are a large-flowered hybrid plant cultured as a garden flower. It is derived by hybridization from several species of the genus Viola. This genus Viola also includes violets and Johnny Jump-Ups.

Pansies

Pansies are large-flowered plants with typical facial markings and have four petal parts up and one down. Pansies were first produced by hybridized crossbreeding in 1815 by Lady Mary Elizabeth Bennet but the name pansy has been around since the Middle Ages: the name pansy probably derived from the French word pensée (thought) and was used in Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet” when Ophelia distributes flowers with the remark, “There’s pansies, and that’s for thoughts”.

Violets

Violets (not African Violets) are a close relative of pansies, a smaller flower than the pansies with two petals pointing up and three petals pointing down. Violets are both perennial and annual bedding plants.

Johnny Jump-Ups

Johnny Jump-Ups, (Viola tricolor) are native wildflowers of Europe and western Asia known as heartsease and are also mentioned in Shakespeare’s play, “A Midsummers Night Dream” when the “juice of heartsease” is used as a love potion when laid on sleeping eyelids.

All types of flowers of the genus Viola are flowers that are perennials (can self-seed) but generally are treated as annuals because of their leggy growth. The first-year plant produces greenery, and bears flowers and seeds in its second year of growth, then dies like an annual. Stem rot, also know as pansy sickness is a soil-born fungus that may cause the plant to collapse without warning in the middle of the growing season. Plants are also susceptible to cucumber mosaic virus transmitted by aphids, causing a fine yellow veining on young leaves and stunted and anomalous flowers.

Genus Viola flowers bloom best in cooler weather. In mild winter areas with short freezes (winter hardy zones 9 – 11) can enjoy winter pansies and can be enjoyed for a short season in the spring, planting as soon as the ground can be worked. Plant Genus Viola plants in sunny or partially sunny positions in well-draining soil. Space plants 6 to 8 inches apart and water thoroughly about once per week being careful not to over-water. To maximize blooming, plant foods should be used about every other week depending on the type of food used. Regular deadheading can extend the blooming period, and if plants become lank and leggy, shear back halfway to force new growth and bloom. These plants are not very heat-tolerant; warm temperatures inhibit blooming and hot muggy air causes rot and death.

Thus, as my grandmother was trying to tell me, DO NOT plant pansies in the summer in Alabama

Ann Coker, an intern in the 2023 Master Gardener Class, lives in Montgomery. For more information on becoming a master gardener, visit www.capcitymga.org or email capcitymga@gmail.com