Johnny-Jump-Up or Heartsease

Common Name: Johnny-Jump-Up, Heartsease, Wild Pansy, Ladies' Delight, Jump-Up-And-Kiss-Me^[1]

Scientific Name: Viola tricolor

Jefferson recorded sowing seeds of "Tricolor" at Shadwell, his boyhood home, on April 2, 1767.^[2] It was grown in American gardens before 1700, although the first documented citation known is by John Lawson in History of Carolina (1718).^[3] Native over large areas of Europe and western Asia, this ancestor of our modern pansy has many common names, including wild pansy, ladies' delight, and jump-up-and-kiss-me. The name "pansy" derives from the French word pensée, an analogy used by Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet: "and there is pansies, that's for thoughts."^[4] Darker forms, including types with nearly black petals, such as -€˜Black Violet' and -€˜Bowle's Black', were selected by the late 19th century.

It is a hardy, spring-flowering perennial grown as an annual with charming, pansy-like flowers showing three colors in shades of purple, yellow, and white.

Footnotes

1. ↑ This article is based on a Center for Historic Plants Information Sheet.
2. ↑ Betts, Garden Book, 4. Manuscript and transcription at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
3. ↑ Denise Wiles Adams, Restoring American Gardens: An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants, 1640-1940 (Portland, Oregon: Timber Press, Inc., 2004), 232.
4. ↑ Act IV, Scene V.

Further Sources

• Betts, Edwin M., Hazlehurst Bolton Perkins, and Peter J. Hatch. Thomas Jefferson's Flower Garden at Monticello, 3rd ed. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986. See specifically pp. 79
• Coates, Alice M. Flowers and their Histories. London: Black, 1968. See specifically pp. 264-265
• Dutton, Joan Parry. Plants of Colonial Williamsburg. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg, 1979
• Leighton, Ann. American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1986
• Seeds available for purchase at Monticello Museum Shop
• Stuart, David and James Sutherland, Plants from the Past: Old Flowers for New Gardens. London: Penguin Books, 1989
• Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants