Gabe Garcia is a garden center’s dream in fall.
On a recent Friday afternoon, he methodically loaded up his cart at the Primex Garden Center in Glenside, Pennsylvania, with pots of mums and ornamental cabbages and kale, so many there was likely no room for the pumpkins and gourds he’ll want to mix them with when he returns to his home.
“What else are you going to put out there if you want color at this time of year?” he asks.
How about pansies?
“I did them in spring,” Garcia says. “Been there, done that.”
So it is that modern pansies, descended from Viola tricolor, the tiny European wildflower better known as Johnny-jump-ups, remain the underdogs of autumnal competition in the 21st century garden. And the ubiquitous mum, cabbage and kale, which some consider the floral equivalent of fast food, rule.
“I hate mums, but people love them. We can’t keep them in stock,” says Tom Horn, Primex nursery manager.
Like mums, violas are an ancient flower. By the early 19th century, and extending well into the 20th, they — and their bigger-bloomed, cultivated offspring, the pansies — were coveted by breeders and wealthy collectors and widely celebrated in poetry, plays, artwork, and folklore.
Popular culture, too. The 1951 Walt Disney film “Alice in Wonderland” featured a hilarious chorus of singing pansies and other anthropomorphic garden performers.
Today, hybridizers are sending more — and more interesting — pansies into the marketplace for spring and fall planting. Colors have expanded from the traditional white, purple and yellow, to red, orange, apricot, bronze, peach, pink, mahogany and near-black.
Single-color varieties without markings are called “clears.” Bicolors have the trademark “faces,” known rather ironically as “blotches.” Little brown or black lines radiating from the velvety flower’s center are described as “whiskers” or “penciling.”
Someday, perhaps, when the mum bubble bursts like so many dyed-turquoise poinsettias on Dec. 26, more consumers will agree with Charlotte Kidd, a professional gardener, who considers pansies her favorite flower.
“They always make me smile,” she says. “They’re cheerful, open-faced, an invitation, a posture to joy.”
Growing up to 9 inches tall, with blooms as wide as 3 inches or more, pansies will survive most moderate winters and keep going into the following spring.
They’ll poop out in June; they don’t like the heat.
But during the fall and sporadically through all but the most brutal winters, “pansies are a flowering machine,” says Venelin Dimitrov, production manager for fruits and flowers at W. Atlee Burpee &Co., the seed company in Warminster, Penn.
Potted mums, unless you’ve planted them in the ground already, will probably not make it to March. And those seasonal cabbages and kales, which you can — but probably wouldn’t want to — eat, reliably turn to mush with the deep frost.
Still, potted mums, whose mass-marketing began in the 1980s, along with ornamental cabbages and kale, remain the sentimental symbols of the changing season. They’re also cheap, easy to toss when the snow flies.
Kathi Clayton of Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill, a self-described “mum maniac” in autumn, also likes pansies. “They’re bright and colorful and gorgeous,” she says. “They last a long time and will come back.”
But she thinks mums are easier to work with, one big mound to stick in the ground or container as opposed to dealing with more delicate pansy stems.
“I’m very good at buying a mum and putting it in a pot,” she says.
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