About Face For Fall With The Friendly Faces Of Pansies

Blue and Orange Garden of Icicle Pansies.

You likely think pansies are a great spring flower to plant, and they are, but they are just as terrific to plant in September for fall color. Surprise!

More pansies than ever before have been blooming in northern gardens. In the snowy areas, the snow acts like a ‘blanket’ over the pansies in winter, and then in spring, they pop up looking very colorful and lively.

Gardeners are sometimes skeptical of fall-planted pansies as this seems to violate the mainstream sequence of what blooms at what time; for example, bulbs and pansies in the spring, annuals and perennials in the summer, and mums in the fall. More gardeners are now pulling out ragged annuals around early September and replacing them with pansies, or they are planting pansies in the fall in the same beds with spring bulbs. Now the pansies do double duty with color in the fall and join in on the color frenzy with the bulbs that flower in the spring. Pansies look great in November when most other colorful plants have died and the grass is getting brown, and then again in April and May around the ankles of daffodils and tulips.

For tips on planting Icicle Pansies in the fall, or when they’ll arrive at your nearest garden center, visit Fernlea Flowers at: www.fernlea.com. (MS)