I found these two by the side of my garage and had nice small flowers so I put them in pots. I then saw them being sold at Home Depot but in a mixed blend of plants with a label "Fall Flowering Plants" so I can't tell what it's actual name. It would be nice if someone could identify it and my other question is and are these perennials? Thanks Arthur
Pansies. These are great cool-weather flowers. Well...these are marketed as annuals, but I have found that if you let them go to seed they will in effect be perennials---reseed themselves. I had a large pot in which I planted some early one spring, and for 2-3 springtimes thereafter up they came all on their own. Welcome to the Forum!
Welcome! If you pull off the dead flowers they will bloom longer. Then as Togata said later in the summer let a few of the dead flowers make seeds for next year. Barb
Viola tricolor. At least in the past anyway "pansy" tended to be used instead for different, large-flowered hybrid types sometimes called V. x wittrockiana botanically.
Yeah, the ones with the 'face'. Was being offhandedly casual in my terminology. Nearly verging on that 'common name' issue. (Veering off!) Seems a lot of folks---yes, I admit I do this too---refer to all flowering plants of this ilk as 'pansies'. Violas, johnny-jump-ups, old-fashioned pansies, all are lumped together in a inaccurate fashion. Sloppy of me! (Blame it on heat stress: my own.) In any case, cakeship has some nice plants--ones that are welcome as volunteers.
You might also be interested to know that they're edible flowers, and were for a great long time used as cake decorations. They're quite lovely in salads as well.
For a while... until they start to seed themselves so thickly that they become a pest. And it can be a perennial, by the way.
Ditto to pansies; left one is fairly close to Wild Pansy Viola tricolor, the right one is a cultivar with larger flowers and different colour pattern.
The one on the right also has longer leaves. As with some other long popular, commercially prevalent types there is all manner of genetic combinations being grown.
