VIOLAS AND PANSIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 September 1941, Page 8

VIOLAS AND PANSIES

TREATMENT IN GROWING. One is often asked what is the difference between a pansy and a viola. There is a difference in the shape, the pansy being almost round and the viola narrower and longer, the pansy has usually several colours and markings, whereas the violas are usually self-coloured with a distinct eye, but it is in their origin that they differ most. The pansy is a hybrid between Viola lutea and Viola tricolor, a little wild pansy found growing in cultivated fields in England; whereas the viola is a hybrid between Viola cornuta and some of the other wild species. They are, however, so close in appearance that a few years ago an attempt was made to call the violas “tuftecj pansies” owing to their closer growth than the pansies.

They both require the same treatment, and both can be used for the same purpose, namely, for edging and carpeting rose beds and borders, edging mixed or shrubbery borders, and for furnishing a semi-shaded rock garden. They like a moist soil, plenty of farmyard manure, water during dry weather, and in light soils a mulch of leafmould of hops, or well-rotted stable manure. To keep them flowering throughout the summer it is necessary to pick off the old flowers before they have a change to set seed. Yeung plants can be raised from seed which can be' sown in the autumn without heat or in spring with gentle heat, and brough on like the ordinary bedding plants. They will flower during the summer when the best forms , can be selected for further propagating, and the poor ones discarded. They can be increased by division, the old flower stems being cut off in autumn and the young growths divided up and replanted in the spring. It is better, however, to put in cuttings of the young shoots in the autumn, in a bed of sandy soil, which can be shaded until the spring, when they can be planted out. Raising pansies and violas from seed is very interesting, they both set seed readily, but when this is to be done they should be planted some distance apart for they cross fertilise readily.