Pansies. Cheer Up Your Garden with These Cool Season Favorites

Pansies are one of the joys of cool season gardening. We expect them to be one of the first flowers on the nursery shelves in the spring, but they're equally great in the fall. Gardeners in warmer climates get to enjoy their smiling faces all winter.

Although technically a perennial, the pansy blooms its heart out for a season and then goes downhill from there. So most gardeners just grow them as annuals or biennials. Nurseries know this and put a whole new crop of pansies out for sale in the fall. But recent pansy breeding has provided us with pansies that bloom through a light snow, as well as much later into the heat of summer. But we really need them when it’s too cold for most other plants to put on a show. Pansies planted in the spring can be clipped back and tucked between summer bloomers, to reemerge refreshed and blooming in the fall. They always out bloom my mums and asters. And their flowers are edible! So if you’ve pooh-poohed pansies in the past, it’s time to give them another look.

Photo: © Marie Iannotti (2008) licensed to About.com, Inc.