Pansy
Hardy Perennial.
Six to ten inches.
Flowers of many colours, April to September.

Thought nominally a perennial, the Pansy, for ordinary garden purposes, is best treated as a biennial.
Though plants can be raised from cuttings, and of course must be, if any one desires to keep with certainty a given strain or variety, yet a stock annually raised from seed is far healthier and easier to manage, and for all but the ingrained fancier by far the most satisfactory.
If cuttings are required, they should be taken at the middle of August; select short, solid side shoots, not leggy or pithy pieces; cut them cleanly below a joint, and dibble in sandy soil under a light hand-glass or some such protection.
They must be shaded and kept moist, and when they have struck root, may be planted out in the autumn.
In raising seedlings, choose a really good strain.
The so-called “Show”

Pansies are either “selfs” of one colour, or have large blotches of one colour on a ground of another; the “Fancies” are more various, selfs, rayed and streaked, belted, blotched and parti-coloured flowers.
The seed may be sown in a mild heat in March, pricked out, hardened, and planted out in May; this will give flowers from July onwards.
But the best way of raising seedlings Pansies id to sow in pans or boxes of rich sandy soil about the 25th of July.

The boxes may be stood under a north wall; but it is as well to give them the protection of a frame or cold greenhouse; a little shade on a blazing morning, or shelter from the beating down of thunder-rain may make all the difference in the rearing of a healthy lot.
When the seedlings show the second leaf, the boxes must be put out in the open; but they must be well looked after, and never allowed to become dry, or baked on the surface.
About the end of August prick out the little plants carefully on a piece of nicely worked soil, about four inches apart.
By October they should be chubby tufts, three or four inches across; some time before December they should be put out in their flowering beds, in rows a foot apart, and eight inches asunder in the rows.
The ground must be well prepared by digging in plenty of old manure, leaf-mould, road-grit, wood ashes and soot; and it is well to have this done a month before the plants are put out.
In March spread a good dressing of rotten leaves and soot over the beds.
During the summer the hoe must be used to keep the ground open.
As a rule, seedling Pansies flower and finish before there is much chance of severe summer drought, and watering should not be necessary.
The flowers of the first few weeks are the finest; later, they become small, effective by quantity rather than by quality and by September the beds may, as a rule, be cleared.
It is a waste of time to leave any of the plants on the chance of their flowering next year.

The show-man and the fancier have a lofty contempt for seedling flowers, but for the amateur a packet of good seed is a lottery with no blanks.
Among the colours to be found in a fair batch of seedlings are dark and light blue, velvety black and purple, crimson, rose, yellow (both buttercup and primrose tints), mahogany and bronze, violet and mauve, chestnut and pure white.
Plants from seed have stamina rarely found in cuttings.
Among the good qualities of the pansy its delicate scent is too seldom remembered.