Spring Flowers

I love pansies.  I love the old fashioned form of pansies which still have a scent, and those happy little faces.  While I was AWOL from the blog I treated myself to an entire flat of pansies and went crazy planting them in the yard.  One of the things I love about pansies is that they're pretty tough little guys.  They will bloom through frosts, and even through snow.  They are among the last flowers blooming in my containers in the Fall, and the first I plant in the Spring.  Like me, they tend to get a little exhausted and grumpy in the heat, but by then you have your choice of summer blooming plants to replace them.

I put a ring of pansies around the weeping mulberry in the front yard.  Then I put blue hyacinths and yellow daffodils in my front yard planter, with blue and yellow pansies around them.

Travelling into the back yard, I put frilly burgundy and yellow pansies in a container on the table on the deck, and more of the same in the container which hangs off the railing of the deck.

I feel like I've brought Spring all by myself! I know that we're going to have cooler weather for at least the next week, and it still isn't totally out of the question to have some killing frosts or possibly even snow before our traditional planting date in the middle of May.  I actually hope that we do have several weeks of cooler and rainy weather because we haven't had the snow base, nor enough rain to handle a long, dry summer.  But I know my pansies will handle whatever this season throws at them, except an extended heat wave.  The more I pick the flowers, the more the pansies will bloom, so I can enjoy their fragrance inside as well as their happy faces outside.  A win-win situation for all of us.