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Book Review: Pansies – How to Grow, Reimagine, and Create Beauty

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Articles: Book Review: Pansies – How to Grow, Reimagine, and Create Beauty

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Jennifer de Graaf

Topics: Growing for Biodiversity, Plants You Need

Summer 2025

Pansies – How to Grow, Reimagine, and Create Beauty with Pansies and Violas, by Brenna Estrada, includes information on the history, cultivation, and use of pansies, but that doesn’t do justice to what a pleasure it is to peruse this book. For starters, the staging of the photos allows the pansies to really show off with understated backgrounds and handmade ceramics. It is flat-out beautiful and well researched with a hefty dollop of close observation and experience. Reading this book is like reading a letter from a dear friend.

Be sure to study the chapter on growing them for Estrada’s myth-busting advice. This chapter will challenge the reputations of these herbaceous gems while providing you with a valid win-win reason to remove blooms for use in recipes, bouquets, and even in the bath. The section on collecting seed and germinating pansies is essential reading which, again, busts myths with clear, informative, information. Of note, she also includes considerations for growing pansies to benefit pollinators, for cut flowers, and as companions to veggies.

Beyond cultivation, Estrada demonstrates several flower arrangements with color palettes that combine pansies with irises, roses, yarrow, zinnias, and others that further emphasize the incredible color diversity available. There is seemingly a pansy for every color palette and vibe imaginable.

However, for anyone who has been frustrated that plant catalogs almost never explain the differences between similar hybrids, for the 50 Pansy varieties described in Pansies, that problem is solved. After pages for dozens of colorful pansy cultivars with vivid written portraits and photos, there are six black pansy cultivars gathered together showcasing how these visually similar black cultivars differ from each other in a variety of qualities like scent, size, and subtle quirky differences. If you are at all amused by black pansies, don’t miss the description for ‘Black Devil’. Reading about each of the fifty cultivars in Pansies will probably leave you either hungry or nostalgic, maybe both, and definitely smiling.

Not if, but when this book has you wanting more pansies in your life, look up Three Brothers Blooms as a source for seed. Three Brothers is Estrada’s own small enterprise filling gaps in the seed supply of Pansies to those of us who are fans like me.

Book Review by Jennifer de Graaf, de Graaf Design Associates