Pansy - Antique Shades

I have been growing this kind of pansy for a few years now, it is called Antique Shades. They are F1, so you never know what comes out of the packet but I generally get those beautiful peach, mauve and caramel shades. The flower heads are always quite small, it’s such a lovely little plant. Extremely easy to grow from seeds, once they are ready to plant out, I grow them in bigger pots with other plants around or just individual terracotta pots (on the steps leading from the house to the garden).

This year, I decided to plant a few of these plants into a big pot that is by the pond. You might remember this pot from Spring with tulips in it. Well, now, this pot has a few of these pansies (by the way, do you know the difference between pansies and violas? If a bloom has four petals and three are pointing upwards but one downward, the is a pansy) scabiosa ochroleuca (grown from seeds that I collected from a friend’s garden, thank you Chris) and wild carrots (bought as plug plants) The reasons why I have these plants is two fold, one is that I absolutely love them but secondly, I want them to self seed around the back of the garden where old paving stones are laid and all sorts of treasures grow between them (just to name a few: marjoram, fennel, geranium, cow parsley or campanula) So, fingers crossed they will thrive in this pot and will scatter their seeds in the garden.

While these pansies have generally small heads (not as small as heart's ease or wild pansy) but quite close, this year, some of the plants turned out quite giant compared to the others. I wonder what happened, maybe the simple fact that these are F1 seeds as those blooms are also of various pretty colours.

It doesn’t really matter as I absolutely love them and will continue growing them. Such a pretty and easy, modest and generous plant.