Johnny jump up

Back in 2019 I bought some seeds of a flower called 'Johnny Jump up' or 'Heartsease' (Viola tricolor).  It is one of the wild pansies.  

The flowers are pretty.  They have edible leaves and flowers, the leaves have a bunch of medicinal properties, and are said to self seed so easily that once you plant them they are there forever.  While they are edible, and have various medicinal properties, I wanted them because they look nice and are said to mostly look after themselves. 

I planted some seed, the plants were small and the flowers were rather pretty.  

Johnny jump up flowers

It was too dry that year so I could only water some plants, I decided to stop watering these and figured they should return from seed they dropped.  The summer of 2019-2020 had record breaking heat, it was very dry, there were extreme bushfires across the Eastern side of Australia, and the air was thick with smoke for weeks.  The following year was cooler and wetter, but no Jonny Jump Up plants grew, not a singe one.  

The 2019-2020 summer was dreadful

Many of the annual plants I grew over the summer of 2019-2020 produced seed that never germinated.  The smoke certainly stopped pollinating insects from flying, but I think there is more to it.  Most produced seed, but the seed never germinated.  Many plants that are not insect pollinated also produced seed that never germinated.  

I thought about buying more Johnny jump up seed, but never got around to it.  This year (2024), after not having any of these plants for years, one grew.  

Wild pansy flowers

I thought after such a long time that there must not have been any viable seed in the soil, clearly there was at least one.  

This plant is growing with a lot of competition from neighbouring weeds and things.  I pulled out some of the taller grass so it has sunlight, I gave it a little water, other than that I tried not to intervene.  

You will notice that the two flowers look very different.  This is normal, the parent stock used to do this too.  It has nothing to do with the age of the flowers, the dark one was dark when it first opened, and it stayed darker.  The lighter one was lighter when it opened, and it does not appear to be getting darker as it ages.  

While I will probably try to save a little seed from this plant, I won't do that until it has had a chance to drop some seed first.  I would hate to collect all the seed and inadvertently prevent it from setting up a seed bank in the soil.  

It is getting late in the season, hopefully it has time to set seed and establishes a little population of self seeded plants.  Winter shouldn't kill the plant, even if frosts come early it should survive and be able to flower and set seed in spring.  

I like it when things self seed, and I like it when plants produce self-sustaining populations.