Botanical name: Viola tricolor
Folk names: Heartsease, love-in-idleness

Type: Annual or short-lived perennial

Wildlife: Nectar for bumblebees.

Flowers: April to November

Decorative merit: Dainty, five-petalled, spurred flowers that look like mini faces in a mix of blue-violet, yellow and white. Petals marked with black lines to guide pollinators. Deep green, oval leaves with blunt teeth. Flowers can be used as edible decoration.

Where: Sun or part-shade. Low-growing, front of borders, in gravel gardens and herb patches, in planters and terracotta pots with gravel mulch. Mine mix well with creeping thyme in a gravel strip in the sun and in dry shade under conifer trees. Allow to establish self-seeding colonies.

Folklore: Long associated with love. William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The juice of it, on sleeping eyelids laid, Will make or man or woman madly dote, Upon the next living create it sees.” And in Hamlet: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember; and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts…”

Donate seeds to Exeter Seed Bank