40 
House & Garden 
T he finest pansies 
come from reliable 
seeds, so the best 
are the cheapest in 
the final result 
PANSIES 
FROM 
YEAR TO 
YEAR 
facts About Planting and Care Which If ill Enable } ou to Grow Plants Richly 
Rewarding You with Their Perfection of Bloom 
T HE general impression is that the garden 
pansy is, like the petunia and the cosmos, 
an annual, and that the plants grown from seed 
will die after blooming because they have com¬ 
pleted their life-round. True, the seedsman’s 
catalog usually carries the letters “HP” as the 
class in which the pansy belongs. This means 
“hardy perennial,” which is just what the 
pansy actually is, though usually treated as a 
“hardy annual.” 
In general, two propagating plans are used 
by the pansy-loving amateur. If he is wise, 
he sows the best pansy seed he can buy about 
July 20, or even later, transplants the little 
seedlings once, and then toward freezing time 
moves them into a cold-frame, where the plants 
winter, beginning to grow actively very early 
in the spring, and being finally transplanted 
in full bloom to garden, bed or border during 
April or May. 
Or, the pansy-desiring person sows the seed 
in spring, and if the season is not too hot and 
dry, the plants will bloom by early fall, though 
hardly so plentifully as if they had been grown 
the previous fall. The pansy is a cool-weather 
plant, be it remembered, and always does best 
in ground not heated by 
summer suns. 
Summer Care 
Now these fall-grown, 
wintered-over pansies, i f 
the cold-frames have been 
furnished with very rich 
ground, will bloom early 
and often, and if the with¬ 
ered blooms are carefully 
removed — or better, if 
plenty of pansies are giv¬ 
en away—they will con¬ 
tinue to flower. But as 
they bloom they grow and 
become “leggy,” spreading 
out over the ground. The 
central stems do not so 
well cover the roots, and 
the hot sun hurts them. If 
the plant is permitted to 
form seed, a process re¬ 
quiring vigor and strength, 
it is not unlikely that by 
midsummer it has either 
given up the ghost or is so 
decrepit that the neat 
j. Horace McFarland 
gardener removes it on general principles. It 
is this situation which has brought about the 
idea that the pansy is an annual, and must be 
grown every year. 
For the most part, it is probably better to 
raise some pansies from seed each year. A 
favorite plant, however, can easily be carried 
over, and will richly reward the gardener for 
the little trouble required to do it. 
Carrying Over 
The procedure is very simple. When the 
pansy plants begin to be long and straggling, 
they may be cut back to main stems, only an 
inch or two above the ground. Cut off the 
extended growths close to a joint, or bud, and 
either enrich the ground about the plants or, 
after soaking the ground so as to be able to 
lift the plants with a ball of earth, transplant 
them to rich ground in a new location. If this 
is done in hot summer—as I regularly do it at 
Breeze Hill—it will be found better to move 
the pansies to a somewhat shady spot—and 
they will stand much shade. 
Such plants, if well watered, soon make new 
growth, and will bloom as well as ever, im¬ 
proving as the cool days of fall approach. 
These revived plants are in order to carry 
over winter just where they are. After the 
ground is lightly frozen, scatter over them an 
inch or two of loose manure, which is all the 
protection they get at Breeze Hill. Often they 
do not get even that, and yet they carry over 
successfully. The winter of 1919-20 was a 
particularly hard one, yet many pansy plants 
came through it uninjured, though some of 
them had been entirely unprotected. 
It is these carried-over plants that pro¬ 
vide the earliest and most bloom. While the 
fine little cold-frame seedlings are yet hurry¬ 
ing to get into bloom, the old plants are cov¬ 
ered with good flowers. One white-blooming 
pansy had its earliest flowers open in the face 
of a late snow, which did not annoy it at all, 
and for each of three successive Sundays that 
plant had over forty good flowers open. It 
was a perfect ball of bloom, doubly welcome 
because so early. 
In Breeze Hill’s center garden a whole 
row of pansies edging some climbing roses sur¬ 
vived the winter happily, and one plant, of the 
rare Madame Irene strain of yellow and 
orange, has been for weeks 
a mass of flowers. In¬ 
deed, as I write in late 
June, these are yet the 
best pansies I have. 
Soil Richness 
Pansies are not light or 
dainty feeders, it should 
be remembered. They must 
have rich soil, very rich, to 
do their beautiful best, and 
cultivation and watering 
are also desirable. It will 
be seen whenever a pansy 
plant is transplanted that 
it has a mass of delicate 
fibrous roots, feeding into 
any near-by soil richness. 
It is this fibrous-rooting 
habit that makes both 
transplanting and fertili¬ 
zation easy, for the plant 
may be readily lifted, and 
it is always ready to make 
new roots and new growth 
in a new place that has 
(Continued on page 66) 
wYWW* cool ' weather Plants and do best in around not heated by summer suns 
With special care they may be carried over the winter into a second blooming season 
