Last year we were staring at an awful lot of exposed soil while the plants in the new bed were filling in slowly. To liven up the space we stuck almost a hundred little pansies into the ground.

Pansies are fairly short-lived annuals for us, especially as the weather heats up. After a couple of freakish heat waves in early spring, with temperatures up to 98 one day, the plants looked like hell, and so I pulled most of them. By that point they’d had a chance to set seed and drop some into the garden.

For the last several weeks, there’ve been little pansy seedlings coming up all over. Here’s the first one of them to bloom.

This plant came up in an area that had only been planted with small-flowered pure white pansies. But with lavender swooshing on the two upper petals it clearly shows characteristics of some of the pansies that were planted nearby. Some pollinator probably visited one of the other pansies before stopping by the all-white one that set the seed. Who’s the father? The big white pansies with the purple faces? The dark blue-purple variety with the almost-black mask? I have no idea.

Since I’m no expert on pansy genetics, I suppose there’s even the possibility that white hybrid pansies don’t come true to seed. But I bet on the hybridization scenario.

This little seedling didn’t come up in an ideal location, but I’ll definitely keep it. Pretty and delicate, it looks nothing like what you find in the seed catalogs.