If your garden is looking a little brown and dreary about now
due to our coldest winter in some time, consider a bright
pick-me-up complete with perky faces and sweet fragrance.
If your garden is looking a little brown and dreary about now due to our coldest winter in some time, consider a bright pick-me-up complete with perky faces and sweet fragrance. We’re talking violas, which just happen to be the featured flower for 2007 as named by the National Garden Bureau.
The latter is a nonprofit organization based in Illinois that publicizes flowers and vegetables. The year 2007 just happens to have been named the Year of the Viola, as far as flowers are concerned. Next week, I’ll cover the vegetable counterparts, the Year of the Cabbage and Kale.
Violas, as well as their cousins – pansies – can be planted right now without danger of being damaged by cold weather. Both will bloom throughout winter, providing flower color until it gets warm, probably June or even July. Violas are floriferous, five-petaled flowers that pop up on dark green, heart-shaped leaves. The new varieties offer larger flowers, so much so that viola flowers can now be just as large as pansies. Some flowers have two or even three colors, many with unique patterns and markings. Many violas have the added benefit of fragrance, too.
Violas have come a long way from Grandma’s “Johnny Jump-Ups.”This popular variety from the 1960s featured purple, yellow and white flowers with interesting marks and whiskers. When Grandma planted them in the garden, “Johnny Jumps” would often reseed throughout the garden and be very hard to get rid of.
That is, in fact, one benefit or problem, depending on how you look at it. Violas have a tendency to become nuisances in the garden where volunteers will come up in the spring and summer. Many times, I’ve been faced with yanking dozens of new seedlings from unwanted spaces by the bucketful. Of course, this is also a benefit in that cheap gardeners save money on new bedding plants!
Today, there are many excellent hybrid violas developed by local companies, such as Goldsmith Seeds in Gilroy and Sakata Seed in Morgan Hill. So-called “Sorbet” varieties come in more than 30 colors including beautiful pastels and two-tone colors. “Penny” violas are available in many colors, some with whiskers and blotches (faces) and others are bicolor. In 2006, “Skippy XL Red-Gold” became the first viola to win an All America Selections Award for superior garden performance.
All violas are easy to start from seed, or you buy already-started transplants at nurseries. They do best in the cooler weather of fall or winter in our area, but can also be grown in the spring and summer. If you plant them during warm weather, put them in a slightly shady area. Other wise, this time of year, go ahead and plant them in full sun.
