Capitalising on the chronic insecurity of Americans in matters of taste, she branded herself the ultimate authority on perfect living, be it making coasters from pressed pansies or whipping up dinner for 20 in half an hour.
A classical English landscape has just been re-created at Prior Park in Bath.The Royal Pavilion in Brighton, George IV's exotic retreat on the Sussex coast, is now surrounded by a proper regency garden instead of a municipal-style mish-mash with "Brighton" spelt out in pansies.
"They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives".Plus ça change, apparently.
Pansies have been grown for so long a period under such diverse conditions and in such a variety of forms that their origin is uncertain.
Among the wildflowers are blue poppies, lotuses, wild pansies, oleanders, orchids, tsi-tog (light pink flowers that grow at high elevations), shang-drils (bell-shaped flowers, either white, yellow, or maroon, that also grow at high elevations), and ogchu (red flowers that grow in sandy regions).
The tufted pansy, or horned viola (V. cornuta), is the parent of numerous forms of bedding pansies.
We Have Come Through! (1917), and some of the verse in Pansies (1929) and Nettles (1930) is brilliantly sardonic.
Viola, genus of about 500 species of herbs or low shrubs, including the small, solid-coloured violets and the larger-flowered, often multicoloured violas and pansies.
Unlike true sea pens, sea pansies lie flat on the substratum.
But most particularly, at this time of year: need an opinion on the disgusting, out-sized yellow and purple pansies sold in polystyrene trays for us to stuff our containers as "winter bedding"?
Remember the scene in your local park on a cold November morning, horribly spaced pansies with a foot of grey earth between each plant, looking like some sort of weird airport-style long-stay car park for abandoned flowers?
