Pansies are popular cool-season bedding plants, and that may be what they are best known for, but pansies are so much more. My guest this week, flower farmer Brenna Estrada, literally wrote the book on pansies, and she joins me to share the potential pansies have. “Pansies: How to Grow, Reimagine, and Create Beauty with Pansies and Violas” is Brenna’s debut book. She previously worked at Erin Benzakein’s Floret Flower Farm before setting out in 2021 to work on her own venture, Three Brothers Blooms, on Camano Island in the state of Washington. It was while working at Floret that she trialed hundreds of varieties of pansies and violas and fell in love with them. She grows pansies with long stems, breathtaking fragrance, and unique color.

 

 

“Ever since I was little, I’ve always loved flowers,” Brenna says. “The idea of a cutting garden was not something I ever knew about until later in life.”

As most people do, she grew pansies in the landscaping around her home and in pots. Her mother and grandmother had loved pansies, but they would grow the ones you see at the grocery store or the hardware store.

Those ubiquitous pansies have “little dark blotched faces, and they’re adorable, but they’re everywhere,” she says. “And there was nothing that really approached me as spectacular about them. They were just another flower.”

Career wise, Brenna didn’t find her way into flowers until she was 40. Prior to that, she spent 21 years as a first responder, first in the military then as a 911 dispatcher.

She calls her transition into flowers a “second chapter of peace.” She joined Floret seasonally before becoming a full-time employee, and she spent a few years there working for Erin.

“You’re hopping when you’re working there. There is a lot to do,” Brenna says. “She has a small dedicated team, and she always has a plan that’s a good 10 steps ahead of even the smartest mind. She’s brilliant with her forecast for her farm, so it’s a very busy place.”

 

 

Down a Pansy Rabbit Hole

When Brenna joined Floret, Erin was in the throes of multiple projects, including pansy trials to develop new varieties and cut flowers. Brenna was shocked to see pansies could be cut flowers — with long stems, various colors and ruffles. Brenna was reminded of antique postcards and paintings from the Victorian era depicting pansies that aren’t grown anymore.

“It kind of started to click,” she recalls. “Well, where did those pansies go? Why don’t we see them now? And if these are possible, what else is possible?”

That opened a rabbit hole for Brenna to go down. Erin got occupied with other projects, such as “Floret Farm’s A Year in Flowers,” and turned her pansy trials over to Brenna.

“Down the rabbit hole I went,” Brenna says. “So I just started going further and further and further and further in.”

She went into it with no specific instructions.

“I don’t think she had any idea where I was going to go with it,” Brenna says. “I think she just knew I loved the pansies, and I was doing my own home trials because I was also curious. I don’t think either of us had any idea what it would amount to.”

In trailing pansies and growing various seeds, Brenna came to learn how difficult it was to source seeds of exceptional varieties. She struggled to find books on pansies and to get answers to her questions on pansies.

The Book on Pansies

In early 2021, Brenna began to wonder if she should be the person to write the book she needs. She had tons of information and notes gathered from her research and trials. However, many publishers were hesitant to take on a book  with an unknown author about a subject that hadn’t been done in this century. However, by 2022, she signed a contract with Timber Press.

“Now that it’s all said and done, I honestly couldn’t imagine the book with anybody else,” she says. “It definitely was meant to be a Timber book.”

Brenna’s goal with the book is to get people to realize that the pansy has been mischaracterized for seven decades. “Let’s all stop underestimating the pansy and be open to everything it’s capable of,” she says.

The pansy has always been a fantastic landscaping plant,” she points out. “But there’s this whole other side to this flower that people have been missing out on. And I feel like people that aren’t pansy fans, if they could just see this side of the pansy, I’m confident that they would be.”

 

 

The Lost Sorts

Pansies are known for being a cool-season, compact bedding plant at the front of a border. But they can also make great cut flowers.

“It is variety dependent, and it’s dependent on how you grow them — and it’s not a new idea,” Brenna says. “… At the turn of the century, they were a very popular cut flower.”

Many pansy varieties that had been popular decades ago are no longer available because no one took an interest in saving the seeds and passing them on. This is true of many flower and vegetable varieties from the past.

“It’s like anything else that goes extinct without care and nurturing,” Brenna says. She calls these missing varieties “the lost sorts,” a term she picked up from a book.

Just since the time her book was published, four varieties she had written about were discontinued. “I want people to be able to keep growing these in their gardens, to not have to lose these varieties they love,” she says.

Really beautiful hybridized varieties are labor intensive to maintain. Saved seeds don’t grow true to seed, so the seed breeding and plant propagating must be ongoing and continuous to preserve a variety.

“They require a lot of devotion, and when that goes away, so do all those varieties,” Brenna says, noting that World War I and World War II halted that work.

Three Brothers Blooms

Brenna named her floral business Three Brothers Blooms after her three sons. Lately, the business is gravitating toward seed sales, but she continues to make bouquets. She is working toward distributing hard-to-get seed imported from Italy, which she visited herself while working on her book.

She had a spring seed sale in April and is planning a fall seed sale.

 

 

Pansy Potential

“Pansies” includes historical paintings, illustrations and drawings, and Brenna cites the few books on pansies that had existed. Most seemed to be written during a narrow period of time, between the 1800s and early 1900s.

“I felt the history of this flower in particular was extremely relevant to where it has been and where it can be,” Brenna says.

She found constant confirmation that pansies were great cut flowers historically. She also found seed catalogs that described how pansies had once looked.

Brenna also observed that irises and pansies share in common their color capabilities.

“They bloom in red, orange, yellow, green,” she says. “They bloom in green and blue. They bloom in purple. They bloom in brown. They bloom in black. They bloom in multicolor.”

Pansy varieties coming out now in Italy and Japan are bringing about shades, textures and fragrance that hadn’t been available for a long time.

“I think they smell like chocolate and honey, in my opinion,” Brenna says. “But it’s a very unique smell to the pansy and the viola. And it’s just extraordinary.”

 

 

The Difference Between Pansies and Violas

All pansies are violas, but not all violas are pansies. Pansies are hybrid violas, mostly derived from the species Viola tricolor.

“It is so blurred now,” Brenna says. “It used to be very clear. Especially back at the turn of the century when they were hybridizing them, it was very obvious.”

Violas, or violets, tend to be smaller, and pansies tend to be larger bloomed.

“There’s such a myriad now in between,” she says. “It’s really just knowing those actual genetics of the cross to create whatever you happen to be looking at at the moment.”

 

 

Caring for Pansies

Pansies are typically cool-season crops that, broadly, can be grown in early spring or fall.  But when you can grow pansies is zone-dependent. In the North, they are popular spring plants, but in warmer regions, they are much more likely to be seen in nurseries in fall. But where Brenna gardens in Washington, she grows pansies all summer long.

Pansies grow in full sun but in warmer weather can benefit from some afternoon shade. Brenna grows all of her pansies out in the open in full sun because she wants to demonstrate that no special structures — like high tunnels or caterpillar tunnels — are needed to grow pansies successfully. She grows the plants out among the slugs, snails and other pests.

Brenna’s long-stemmed pansies start in June and keep blooming through August. She keeps the roots as cool and moist as possible, six to eight inches down.

“What I have found through all my years of trialing is it’s the care. It’s when you plant them out,” she says. “It’s how you care for the roots. It’s letting those roots get established.”

If the roots are happy and the plants are watered, it’s really surprising how well pansies perform through a certain amount of heat, she says.

What really does pansies in isn’t heat but humidity, Brenna notes. “So very hot, humid climates are definitely going to have a harder time versus a drier hot climate.”

Deadhead Pansies for More Resilient Plants

Brenna has had many plants that have perennialized. That is to say, they keep coming back.

“I have so many plants that are 4- and 5-year-old plants that keep coming back,” she says. “… They come back very differently.”

One approach is to deadhead the plants for the first year so they can concentrate their energy on root growth. This takes patience and devotion, Brenna notes.

“It’s a very different plant when you really let those roots get established before you let it flower,” she says.

In her book, Brenna quotes British-born gardener H. H. Thomas’s 1910 gardening handbook “The Ideal Garden.” He observed that pansies grow from May to November and are almost always better in the second year.

 

 

Growing Pansies from Seeds

“Pansy seed is expensive so when growing from seed, I personally start all my seed indoors,” Brenna says. “I like to keep it very controlled. I find that an indoor environment is plenty warm. You don’t need heat mats. I start them all on the surface of the soil. A few years ago, I made the mistake and didn’t cover some. And that’s how I learned that you don’t need darkness, in fact, to germinate, which I’d always been told. So that was a big aha moment for me to realize that. I have yet to find a variety that actually needs darkness to germinate.”

What the seeds do need to germinate is constant moisture. She grows seeds in 72-cell trays and uses humidity domes so the soil does not dry out during germination. And an indoor temperature between 60° and 68° is ideal.

Once the seedlings are established, she removes the humidity dome and puts the seedlings in her unheated greenhouse. The plants like the nights in the upper 40s, lower 50s, and the days don’t get above the 50s in the greenhouse. When the seedlings are an inch tall, she hardens them off and plants them out. She doesn’t pot them up between starting them in cell trays and planting them out.

Propagating Pansies

Hybrid pansies do not grow true to seed but can be propagated via cuttings. However, the cuttings must be taken before the stems flower. When they begin to flower, the stems start to hollow out, and you cannot take a cutting for propagation from a hollow stem.

After a plant does its first bloom cycle, cut down to the first joint, Brenna says. Sprinkle a little compost on the plants, and they’ll send up brand new basal shoots around mid to late summer. Those are the shoots that should be taken for propagation.

“They’re really pretty easy,” she says. “As long as it’s a healthy plant, you could turn around and literally pop ’em right back in the soil again. And as long as there’s moisture there for the roots to form, they’re pretty easy too.”

A few older strains of unhybridized violas can be divided via their large, clustered root bases.

Layering is another propagation method that Brenna is experimenting with to preserve endangered varieties.

Saved seeds likely won’t grow out to look like their parent plant, and they may be inferior, unhealthy plants.

Pansies and Pollinators

Many pansies have the familiar “blotch and whiskers” pattern. Some people say pansy varieties must have this pattern, or at the very least must have color, to attract pollinators. But Brenna can vouch that all of her pansies, including the black ones, are swarming with pollinators.

“They’re a great pollinator plant, absolutely. And they’re edible. They’re a good people plant too,” she says.

 

 

Pansies, Slugs, Ducks and Deer

The biggest enemy of pansies in Brenna’s experience is the slug.

“With the slugs being one of the biggest enemies to the pansy, we actually brought ducks onto our farm a few years ago,” she says. “And they’ve been just these valiant little warriors. I think the slug population for my pansies and irises has declined by at least 50%, if not more. They’re fantastic. You just have to get over the green poo. But they’re worth their weight in gold, really, when it comes to the slugs.”

She has a pair of muscovy ducks — friendly ducks that love to see her and love to be pet. She calls them “the dogs of the duck world.”

Deer loves pansies, so Brenna grows pansies inside a fenced-in area.

Powdery mildew and black spot, or leaf spot, are other pansy problems. Brenna uses copper fungicide when the diseases get really bad. The plants push through and recover.

Root rot is common with pansies. The soil must be loamy, rich and well-draining to prevent it.

“It needs some sand, it needs to drain well.” Brenna says. “So it’s almost like you’re fighting two sides of the coin here. You want a well draining soil, but you also need to keep the roots moist and happy. So it’s really finding that perfect mix, and that’s where I think raised beds make a big difference.”

Having raised beds makes it easy to change soils or add amendments such as wood ash.

 

 

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Brenna Estrada on her book “Pansies. “If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.

Do you enjoy growing pansies and violas? Let us know in the comments below.