A Pansy for Your Thoughts

Ponder the watercolor petals of an enchanted flower.

Pansies are everywhere—tucked into garden beds, spilling from window boxes, brightening quiet corners where nothing else will grow. But before they became a beloved garden flower, they belonged to the realm of enchantment. Their ruffled petals were slipped beneath pillows to summon vivid dreams. Fairies were said to wear them as hats and shoes. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a pansy was pressed into a love potion.

That magic lingers in their appearance: petals like watercolors, deep violet into butter yellow, bruised burgundy into the blush of a ripe peach. Some pansies are so dark they look like black velvet, their faces pricked with yellow like tiny stars. Others hold a burst of orange at their center, as if the sun itself had set inside their blooms. Each pansy has its own distinct face, lifting toward the light—watchful, full of something left unsaid. Maybe that’s why they were named for the French pensée, meaning thought. 

By the Victorian era, they had also become a symbol of love—exchanged in secret as part of floriography, the intricate language of flowers. Few blooms were as popular for expressing unspoken feelings—desire, devotion, even longing. So in this edition of Arrangements, we ponder the pansy—a flower of whimsy and wonder, its meanings hidden in plain sight.

1. In “Pansy 12,” Robert Llewellyn magnifies the flower’s face into something almost otherworldly. Using over 100 exposures blended into a single image, Llewellyn renders a familiar bloom into a luminous study of light and structure—botanical portraiture at the edge of abstraction.

2. Sarah Blaustein’s painting “Press Play R-4” unfolds in waves of color, like petals touched by rain. Its ruffled edges and layered ripples recall pansy faces. Echoing O’Keeffe’s organic forms and Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique, it remains uniquely its own—a meditation on movement, color and nature’s quiet shifts.

3. Carved from sycamore, walnut and birch, Nadia Yaron’s “Wild Pink” reimagines a flower in sculptural form. Its softly rounded petals—resembling a pansy—are painted in a vivid pink that fades to lavender at the center, resting on a wooden stem. Yaron’s work, shaped by a reverence for nature, turns the fleeting blossom into something enduring.

4. Joe Brainard’s 1967 mixed-media collage swells with color, a dense field of pansies that hover between pattern and portrait. Each overlapping bloom faces forward—playful yet precise, soft yet persistent. Flowers that endure, reseed, return.

5. Leigh Wen’s “Pansy” unfurls in oil on wood, its petals painted in luminous violets and molten reds. Magnified to 60 inches, delicate veins stretch across the surface, tracing a map of movement and light. Both fragile and powerful, the flower feels suspended in transformation—unfolding, expanding, alive.

6. Florist Pearl Holmes makes magic with tiny flowers, as seen in this arrangement where pansies curl and climb in shades of violet, lavender and periwinkle—a plant she says embodies the spirit of her studio. “Oftentimes, when I am arranging, I will center everything around the smallest flower as my focal point,” she says. “Give me something tiny, and I will arrange it happily with tweezers.” Read the full interview here.

7. Pansies aren’t just for gardens—they’re edible, their petals adding a delicate, slightly grassy sweetness to dishes. Scattered over cakes or candied in sugar, they turn desserts into something almost fairy-tale-like. In Sayana’s maple buttermilk custard pie, they rest on the golden surface like little watercolor brushstrokes, a final touch of color and whimsy.

8. Aimee France’s basil olive oil cake is a garden in bloom—layers of white wine blueberry jam and lemon buttercream, tinted with turmeric, and crowned with crystallized pansies, fresh violas and bush basil from her own garden. The frilled edges and sculptural peaks turn the cake into something almost theatrical, a decadent ode to edible flowers.

9. I previously featured Julia Heuer’s petal-like bags in my Flower-Inspired Gift Guide, so I was excited to see her recent collaboration with Baggu. This allover pansy print is a favorite—bold, painterly and in full bloom.

10. For something on the nose, this Pansy perfume by Leland Francis opens with lemon, orange and raspberry before settling into an herbal blend of rosemary and clary sage. I'd also suggest Fleur Éclair by Régime des Fleurs, which smells like afternoon tea in a garden, where pastries are dusted with sugar and pansies hum in the breeze—like Wonderland after a visit with the singing flowers.

11. Allison Schulnik’s stop-motion film Eager channels Wonderland but takes a stranger, darker turn. In this eerie, shape-shifting world, pansies sprout faces and limbs, flowers twist and melt and roots writhe through mossy undergrowth—like stepping into a dream where nature is alive in ways both enchanting and unsettling.

12. Pansies have always been one of my mom’s favorite flowers—her home is filled with them: a vintage book with fairies dressed in pansy petals, an antique doorstop shaped like a pot brimming with blooms, a circular ceramic vase with a tiny moat for holding fresh pansies. Since pansies are the flower of thought, I asked for hers. She told me:

“How much do I love pansies? Let me count the ways,” my mom says. “Their bright, bold color combinations can really cheer you up on a gloomy day and even more so on a sunny day! Some of my favorite pansies are the ones that have faces—two eyes, a nose and a mouth (or beard). Some nurseries call them blotches now, but I prefer to call them by their more romantic name. Pansies, like roses and other flowers, have meanings when given or received. Pansies are for ‘remembrance.’ I wore a pewter pin that held a little bit of water and two pansies to granddad’s funeral and told grandma what it meant—and that we would never forget him.”