who’s your daddy?

Last year we were star­ing at an awful lot of exposed soil while the plants in the new bed were fill­ing in slowly. To liven up the space we stuck almost a hun­dred lit­tle pan­sies into the ground.

Pan­sies are fairly short-lived annu­als for us, espe­cially as the weather heats up. After a cou­ple of freak­ish heat waves in early spring, with tem­per­a­tures up to 98 one day, the plants looked like hell, and so I pulled most of them. By that point they’d had a chance to set seed and drop some into the garden.

For the last sev­eral weeks, there’ve been lit­tle pansy seedlings com­ing up all over. Here’s the first one of them to bloom.

Pansy seedlingThis plant came up in an area that had only been planted with small-flowered pure white pan­sies. But with laven­der swoosh­ing on the two upper petals it clearly shows char­ac­ter­is­tics of some of the pan­sies that were planted nearby. Some pol­li­na­tor prob­a­bly vis­ited one of the other pan­sies before stop­ping by the all-white one that set the seed. Who’s the father? The big white pan­sies with the pur­ple faces? The dark blue-purple vari­ety with the almost-black mask? I have no idea.

Since I’m no expert on pansy genet­ics, I sup­pose there’s even the pos­si­bil­ity that white hybrid pan­sies don’t come true to seed. But I bet on the hybridiza­tion scenario.

This lit­tle seedling didn’t come up in an ideal loca­tion, but I’ll def­i­nitely keep it. Pretty and del­i­cate, it looks noth­ing like what you find in the seed catalogs.

July 15 2008 10:35 pm | Categories: my garden | Tags: •

2 Responses to “who’s your daddy?”

  1. Greg on 17 Jul 2008 at 6:35 am #

    Ha ha…just read your reply com­ments down below…I have a plan to respond to your meme-ness, but after hear­ing that your tag­ger didn’t remem­ber doing it, it was so long ago, I know I have the time needed to effect such a plan.

    What an adorable and per­fect lit­tle pansy! Love the pale lav petals at the top, and of course it goes with­out say­ing, the tiny yel­low eye!

  2. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » greener gardening practices on 07 Jan 2009 at 7:13 pm #

    […] In addi­tion to buy­ing more seeds to grow, I’m sav­ing more seeds from the plants I already have. For species and open-pollenated heir­loom plants, the seed should come true to the orig­i­nal. For hybrid plants, the seedlings can be an adven­ture, some of them com­ing look­ing like their par­ents, oth­ers com­ing out to be inter­est­ing mongrel mixes. […]

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