PANSIES

Pansies with their bright colors and their cheerful faces have always been a favorite of mine. Pansies were once thought to have love powers. The Celts used pansies for making love potions. The wild pansy, Viola tricolor, has names such as johnny-jump-up, heartsease, and love-in-idleness. The garden pansy, V. wittrockiana are sometimes called ladies-delight or stepmother's flower. The wild pansy grows about 6 to 12 inches tall and has flowers about 1 to 2 inches wide. It's leaves are heart-shaped or round. The garden pansy has flowers that are from 2 to 5 inches across. Pansies come in a wide variety ofcolors including puple, blue, lilac, white, brown, orange, and yellow. Pansies are hardy plants despite their delicate looks and prefer cooler spring weather.

Eating Pansies???

Pansies, believe it or not, are edible flowers. The flowers can be used to garnish desserts, salads, or other foods. They can also be candied. If you do eat pansies though, be sure to use only flowers which have been grown without pesticides or herbicides. For recipies using pansies, visit http://www.atlgarden.com/pansies/pansies.html.

Drying Pansies

In order to retain the shape and color of the pansies you are drying, it is best to use a covering method. You will need to have an air tight container and a drying agent such as silica sand. To dry your pansies, first put an inch of the drying agent on the bottom of your contairer. Then place your flowers on the sand face down and sprinkle the sand around and in between the petals of the pansies. Be sure to keep the flowers in the shape you want them to be in. Cover the flowers completely with the sand and cover the container. Let the flowers sit in the air-tight container for a week to 10 days.

Pansies as Gifts

Flowers often have meanings attached to them. Every time a flower is given to someone a message is being sent. Each flower has a different meaning. Even different colors of the same flower will have different meanings sometimes. The word pansy comes from the French word pensee meaning "thought". All pansies, no matter their color, mean "thoughts of you" in the language of flowers. When you give a friend pansies you are telling them you are thinking about them.

I send thee pansies while the year is young, Yellow as sunshine, purple as the night; Flowers of remembrance, ever fondly sung By all the cheifest of the sons of light; And if in recollection lives regret For wasted days, and dreams that were not true, I tell thee that the pansy "freaked with jet" Is still the heart's-ease that the poets knew. Take all the sweetness of a gift unsought, And for the pansies send me back a thought. by: Sarah Doudney

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For more information, check out theses pages:

http://www.atlgarden.com/pansies/pansies.html

http://www.optonline.com/comptons/ceo/03593_A.html

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~swan/final/heard/pansy.html

http://classes.aces.uiuc.edu/NRES107/handouts/drying.htm