Gadenin日本語Get the appShear, do not pick, because there are too many flowers to pinch
A viola is the same job as a pansy carried out at a different scale. Every finished bloom sits on its own thin stalk running down to the crown, and the seed pod forms at the base of the petals, so removing the petals alone leaves the pod on the plant. What changes is the number. A pansy in full flower carries perhaps ten to fifteen open blooms and you can take each spent stalk off individually in a couple of minutes. A viola carries fifty to a hundred, and pinching them one at a time is a job nobody keeps up for a whole season.
So work in two modes. Once a week go over the plant quickly and pull off the obvious fat green pods and any long straggling stalks, taking each one down to the crown. Then, every three to four weeks, take a pair of scissors or shears and cut the entire plant over lightly, removing the top inch (2.5 cm) or so of growth including spent flowers, forming pods and a few open blooms you would rather have kept. The plant looks bare for about five days and comes back thicker and flowering harder than before.
The reason a viola tolerates that treatment and a pansy resents it is bud number. A viola has flower buds forming at almost every leaf joint down every stem, so shearing exposes a reserve that is already there. A pansy carries its buds nearer the tips and takes longer to rebuild. This single difference is why violas hold a display for months with a fraction of the fussing, and it is worth knowing before you stand over one trying to deadhead it flower by flower.
- Weekly: take the fat pods off Run your fingers through the plant and pull out any stalk carrying a swollen green capsule turned upward. Ten of those left to ripen will slow a viola noticeably, and a full crop of them stops it.
- Weekly: pull spent flowers out of the crown Faded blooms that drop into the middle of the plant stay wet after rain and start rot at the center. Clear them out at the same time as the pods.
- Monthly: shear the whole plant lightly Take the top inch (2.5 cm) off the entire mound with scissors. Accept that you are removing some good flowers. New growth breaks within a week and the plant is fully in flower again inside two to three weeks.
- Twice a season: cut back hard by half When the stems have lengthened and the middle is open, reduce the whole plant to half its height, cutting above leaf joints. Water well the day before and feed at half strength immediately after.
- Stop deadheading only where you want seedlings Violas self seed freely and the seedlings are useful. Leave one plant in a corner unpicked and shear everything else, so you get volunteers where you want them and not across the whole bed.
Water and feed for steady growth, not a growth spurt
Violas want soil that stays evenly damp and never sits saturated. In open ground during cool weather that usually means no watering at all for weeks; rain covers it and the plants transpire very little at low temperatures. In containers, check rather than water to a schedule: push a finger an inch (2.5 cm) into the compost and water thoroughly only if it comes out dry. Violas cope with a short dry spell far better than pansies do, wilting and standing back up after one soak, but they have the same weakness at the crown and a pot kept constantly wet in cold weather rots from the base upward.
Water at soil level and in the morning. The mound of fine foliage on a viola is denser than a pansy's, so overhead watering lodges in the middle of the plant and stays there through a cool night, which is where leaf spot and crown rot begin. Morning watering leaves the crown dry by dusk.
Feed lightly and often. A balanced liquid feed at half strength every two to three weeks through the flowering season is right. Violas are less prone than pansies to running to soft leggy growth on rich feeding, but heavy nitrogen still produces the same wrong plant: large soft leaves, long stems, fewer flowers, and tissue that aphids find first and frost damages worst. If a viola is dense green foliage with few blooms and you have been shearing it, cut the feed rather than adding more.
| Condition | Watering | Feeding |
|---|---|---|
| Open ground, cool damp weather | None needed; rainfall is enough | Half strength every three weeks |
| Open ground, dry spell | One deep soak a week | As above; never feed a dry plant |
| Container, cool weather | Only when the top inch (2.5 cm) is dry | Half strength every two weeks |
| Container, mild or warm spell | Check daily; small pots dry fast | Half strength every two weeks |
| Hard frost forecast | Water in the morning if dry, never at dusk | Stop until the cold spell passes |
| Summer heat, plant still alive | Deep soak twice weekly, shade at midday | Quarter strength only, to hold it |
| Pale new leaves, plant stalled | Unchanged | Feed is overdue or the compost is spent |
Write down the date of each feed for every container. Violas are grown across months when little else in the garden needs attention, so the feed most often forgotten is the midwinter one, and that is exactly the one that decides whether the plant surges in spring or drags.
Cutting back a plant that has sprawled
Violas hold a compact mound far longer than pansies, but they do eventually sprawl. The stems lengthen and lie outward, the middle opens into a bare tangle of woody looking stalks, and the flowers move to the tips where they sit on long floppy stems. This follows a warm spell, a run of dull weather, heavy feeding, or simply age after several months of hard flowering. It is not a disease and feeding will not reverse it.
Cut the whole plant back by half. A mound ten inches (25 cm) across becomes a compact five inch (13 cm) one. Cut each stem just above a leaf joint and leave at least two or three leafy joints below every cut, so there are growth points to break from. Do not cut back into bare stems with no leaves on them at all. It looks brutal and it is the correct move; the reason people replace violas that had years left in them is that they could not bring themselves to do this.
Water well the day before, cut on a mild day rather than into a freeze or a heatwave, and feed at half strength straight afterwards. New shoots break from the joints you left within five to ten days and the plant is flowering again in two to three weeks, denser than before because each cut stem sends out two. A viola cut back in late winter usually gives a better spring display than it managed at any point the previous autumn.
Light, heat and where the plant sits
Violas flower most freely in full sun while the weather is cool and prefer shade from the middle of the afternoon once it turns warm. A position with full morning sun and shade from mid afternoon suits them across the whole of their season, and it is worth choosing the spot on that basis rather than on midwinter light alone. Four hours of direct light is the practical minimum; in deeper shade they keep growing but produce a fraction of the flowers and sprawl months earlier.
Heat is what eventually ends them, but they go a good deal further than a pansy does. Violas flower hardest between about 40F and 70F (4C and 21C), and the smaller flowers hold their shape and color up to around 80F (27C) where pansy blooms shrink and wash out at 75F (24C). In a cool summer a sheared and shaded viola will often carry straight through and pick up again in autumn, which no pansy does. In a hot one it stops, but several weeks later than the pansies beside it.
The same toughness works at the other end. Violas keep opening buds during cold snaps that shut a pansy down completely, so in a climate with a long cool shoulder season they simply flower for more weeks of the year. If you have grown pansies and found the display too short at both ends, this is the plant that fixes it.
Note the week your violas first looked stretched and the week they stopped flowering, along with what the weather was doing. Those dates repeat closely year to year in one garden, and knowing them tells you when to shear in advance rather than in reaction.