Heartsease

Viola tricolor

Violaceae

A small three-colored face for salad, sugar, and a cool-season edge that does not mind sitting with lettuce.

Garden pansy and Johnny-jump-up. Not African violet (Saintpaulia), which is a different family.

Parts used: Flower · Young leaf
Traditional notes: Salad garnish · Sugared petal · Cool-season companion
Grow · USDA 6b: Hardy annual / short-lived perennial in zone 6b Direct in early spring or late summer. Barely cover. In work: Mar · Apr · May · Sep · Oct
Harvest: Flowers as they open. Keep cutting and it keeps coming.

A row with spinach and strawberry is the cool-season guild.
Deadhead if you do not want a Viola lawn.

Safety

Ornamental sprays are not food — pick from an unsprayed bed

Companions

Plant with Borage, Calendula, Clove pink, Cornflower, Nasturtium, Spinach.

Lookalikes

Sweet violet — Two violet-family faces. The kitchen candy is usually Viola odorata. Bedding pansies are a different, milder leaf, and some bedding mixes are not grown as food.

Lore

Shakespeare’s love-in-idleness is this flower — the juice Oberon drops on sleeping eyelids. Medieval herbals filed it under heartsease, a name that outlived the dose. The garden pansy is a nineteenth-century enlargement of the same face.

The Herbarium — a teaching catalog, not a clinic. Traditional use is history, not a prescription. USDA 6b dates are a week either way, not a promise. Do not eat, drink, or harvest a plant you cannot name.