Pansies are colorful little flowers that look like they have tiny happy faces painted on their petals! The dark lines and spots on their petals really do look like eyes, a nose, and a mouth smiling up at you. They come in many beautiful combinations of purple, yellow, blue, white, orange, and red, and some even have two or three colors on a single flower. The name “pansy” comes from a French word that means “to think,” because people thought the flower looked like a little face deep in thought. Pansies are part of the same family as violets, so they are like flower cousins!
These tough little flowers actually like cool weather, which makes them different from most other garden flowers. They are often the first flowers planted in the spring and can even keep blooming when the weather starts to get chilly in the fall. In places with mild winters, pansies can bloom right through the cold months! Pansies are also one of the flowers that are safe to eat, and fancy restaurants sometimes put them on top of salads and cakes to make them look extra pretty. Pansies do not grow very tall, but they spread out wide and can cover the ground with a blanket of bright colors that makes any garden look amazing.
