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Traditionally the pansy is a symbol of remembrance: its English name is derived from the French name pensée, which means 'thought'. In Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote:"There are pansies, that's for thoughts"; in the playwrites time the name was spelt pawnce, panzie, or pancye. The pansy is also associated with love, accounting for the folks-name "heartsease", "love-in-idleness", and the rather more earthy "kiss-me-quick", which the wild pansy shares with the field pansy. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare told how Oberon, the king of the fairies, squeezes the juice of heartsease into Titania's eyes in order to induce her to fall in love with Bottom in his guise of an ass. The species name tricolor means three-coloured and refers to the fact that the flowers may be yellow, violet-blue or, more rarely, pink. As often as not, a combination of two or even all three colours may be found in one flower. This ability to to produce flowers of various colours has caught the imagination of horticulturists, who have produce similar large-flowered garden pansies by means of hybridising the naturally occurring species. Extract from the Reader's Digest Field Guide to Wild Flowers |
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