I send thee pansies
Beloved by Shakespeare and lauded by Tennyson, Wordsworth and Rossetti, the pansy was regarded as a wild weed until Victorian gardeners recognised its potential, finds Ian Morton
From Shakespeare to Gertrude Jekyll, the humble pansy has enchanted poets, lovers and gardeners alike, finds Ian Morton
ACCORDING to Classical mythology, the wild pansy was once totally white. Then, one of Cupid’s arrows missed its intended female target and arched down to strike the little plant in the ground beyond, whereupon its upper petals turned purple and it was endowed with Cupid’s attributes of affection, desire and erotic love. This was far too good a tale for Shakespeare to ignore and, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he treated his audiences both to a mythological reminder of a ‘little western flower, before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound, and maidens call it love-in-idleness’ and to its traditional identity and reputation as a love potion—‘juice of the heartsease on sleeping eyelids laid will make a man or woman dote upon the next live creature that it sees’.
Heartsease was derived from St Euphrasia, a pious and charitable 1st-century Middle Eastern nun, who recorded the plant’s employment as a medicinal comfort in times of emotional stress. In Hamlet, the Bard also used the name adopted in the mid 15th century from the French pensée: Ophelia’s flowers included ‘pansies, that’s for thought’, the flower having become a symbol for remembrance. Yet the little plant, common throughout Europe, maintained the Cupid connection through a number of other names across the English-speaking world, including love-lies-bleeding, come-andcuddle-me, Jack-jump-up-and-kiss-me and tickle-my-fancy. It proliferated as an American introduction. ‘Perhaps no flower claims to be so universal a favorite,’ wrote the social reformer and floral writer Dorothea Lynde Dix in 1829. ‘None has been honored with such a variety of names, at once expressive of grace, delicacy and tenderness.’
Poets down the years enthused—ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, William Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti and D. H. Lawrence among them—and painters, too, including Redoute, Fantin-latour, van Gogh and Georgia O’keefe. The 20th-century novel almost had a Pansy among its major heroines: Margaret Mitchell changed her name to Scarlett when Gone with the Wind was on the brink of publication.
The plant also has a long herbalist history. The Greeks and ancient Chinese compounded medicine from it and medieval Europe was convinced of the properties of its mucilage as treatment for skin and bronchial problems, such as epilepsy, rheumatism and cystitis. The wild pansy made its first appearance in botanical literature in 1537, when French writer Ruellius gave it a Latin name, Pensea.
At about the same time, two German writers, Otto Brunfels and Leonhart Fuchs, recorded its adoption as an ornamental garden plant known there as ‘little stepmother’, although the first reference to it as Viola tricolor was by a Dutchman, Rembert Dodonaeus. From the mid 16th century, it was also popular in gardens in Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Poland, according to Stockholm University botanist Prof Veit Brecher Wittrock. His research was so highly regarded that many of the large propagated hybrids named mainly on an ad hoc basis by their creators were gathered under the general classification of Viola wittrockiana. Although widely disregarded in this country as a weed—viola tricolor still bunches in wall crevices and stone steps and readily migrates into gravel paths—the pansy emerged as a horticultural force in this country early in the 19th century. Lady Mary Elizabet Bennet, daughter of the Earl of Tankerville, set about collecting every genetic variant she could find and, with her father’s head gardener William Richardson, cultivated a number of cross-breeds at Walton-on-thames, which she introduced to the horticultural world in 1812. At the same time, Admiral Lord James Gambier’s gardener William Thompson discovered on his Iver estate in Buckinghamshire an aberrant strain with a large blotch on the petals in place of the narrow nectar guides of the native original: the pansy now had a ‘face’.
Public response exploded. By 1819, a ‘great heartsease’ was on sale in Covent Garden. Actress Sarah Siddons filled her garden with pansies and Charles Darwin noted 400 named varieties in 1835, expressing his appreciation of the ‘beautiful, flat, symmetrical velvet-like flowers... magnificently and variously coloured’.
None has such a variety of names expressive of grace, delicacy and tenderness
A competitive vogue developed for “show pansies”. Gertrude Jekyll hated them
Strains were imported and developed by Continental nurserymen. Jacques Odier in Paris and Auguste Miellez in Lille supplied French gardens and, in Brittany, an optician, Jules Bugnot, who took up pansies as a hobby, bred clear yellow blooms up to 4in across. Plantsmen in Germany, such as Benary, Lorenz and the Mette brothers, produced further crosses and Bockmann of Hamburg listed 138 types in his 1841 catalogue. In the same year, the Hammersmith Heartsease Society was founded by James Lee, with the Scottish Pansy Society following shortly afterwards. Both organisations lasted many decades, although Hammersmith was succeeded by the London Pansy and Viola Society.
English strains that had crossed the Channel in about 1840 made their way back in modified form 10 years later and were dubbed Belgian or ‘fancy’ by growers, reflecting work by Charles M’intosh, gardener to the King of the Belgians. Some were not, at first, welcomed, Miellez plants brought in by John Salter being dismissed as ‘French rubbish’ until their size and brilliant colours won approval. The genre was expanded by Chirnside doctor Charles Stuart in Berwickshire, who spent 10 years developing a violetta strain of compact plants with elongated blue and tufted blooms and good fragrance. In Edinburgh, James Grieve—more famous for his apple—did much to turn the often leggy and unreliable pansy into a successful bedding plant.
As nurserymen across the land strove to
cater for burgeoning national enthusiasm, a competitive vogue developed for ‘show pansies’ with perfectly circular and flat ‘faces’ and petals that overlapped without any waves or ripples at the edges. Gertrude Jekyll hated them. In Wood and Garden, she lamented that ‘the poor Pansies have single blooms laid flat on white papers and are only approved if they will lie quite flat and show an outline of a perfect circle. All that is beautiful in a Pansy, the winglike curves, the waves or slightly fluted radiations, the scarcely perceptible undulation of surface that displays to perfection
the admirable delicacy of velvety texture: all the little tender tricks and ways that make the Pansy one of the bestloved of garden flowers: all this is... overtly condemned. The show Pansy judge appears to have no eye, or brain, or heart... all idea of garden delight seems to be excluded’. The tight rules did not last, there was no stopping the plant breeders’ pursuit of new displays, a National Viola and Pansy Society was established in 1914 and a major revision of the pansy scene took place in the 1970s. Today, new variants and colour combinations are as earnestly pursued as they were 200 years ago. Horticulture recognises 24 types and 500 species. Final advice from the blessed Jekyll: ‘Delightful things in a room— they should be cut in whole bunches of leafy stem and flower and bud... as the season goes on they grow longer and bolder, and graduate first into bowls and then into upright glasses... Pansies are always best without mixture of other flowers and in separate colours, or only in such varied tints as make harmonies of the class of one colour.’