3 tricks to growing a beautiful spread of pansies

Delightfully old-fashioned, pansies have never gone out of style. The stems are cute in small bouquets, and you can use the edible blossoms to garnish desserts or cocktails.

Pansies tolerate more cold than other annuals and are often grown from fall to spring.

• Available in a huge range of sizes and colours, pansies grow well in sun or partial shade, reaching 15 to 25 centimetres tall and 25 to 30 centimetres across.
• Fanciful folks say the dark centres in some flowers look like little faces.

In mild climates

• Pansies are real survivors in the snow.
• They do a great job of surviving cold because they can move water out of their leaves and replace it with natural antifreeze.
• But they may still need a little help. When planting pansies in the fall, get them in before the cold temperatures arrive. They need to be well-rooted before soil temperatures drop below about 10°C.

In colder climates

• Pansies can be set out in early spring provided the plants are hardened off for a few weeks first. They'll even survive an early-spring snow.

Get painterly with pansies.

• With so many colours available, it's easy to weave two colours into a beautiful spring tapestry.
• Think of the flowers you have as paint on an easel, and the garden as a canvas.
• Yellow and blue pansies always look great together, or you can use white pansies to help showcase bright tulips and other spring-flowering bulbs.

• For a big boom of blossoms, pinch off the first flush of buds and blossoms that appear in spring. Three to four weeks later, the sacrifice will pay off with a super-size show of blooms all at once.
• Deadhead pansies often to prolong their flowering period.