Viola

Pensée

What it is

The garden pansy is barely two centuries old: Lady Mary Elizabeth Bennet spent the 1810s gathering every form of wild heartsease she could find into her father’s garden at Walton-upon-Thames, and the commercial florists took it from there. The Latin honours Veit Wittrock, the Swedish botanist who set about sorting the resulting tangle of hybrids decades later.

In the kitchen

Buy them unsprayed and use them the same day — the petals bruise brown wherever a finger has pressed. Lay them on last and on something dry: any acid in a dressing bleaches the dark face within minutes.

Goes with

Goat cheese Cucumber Strawberry Olive oil Radish Lettuce

In season alongside

Chickweed Frisée Gernika pepper Komatsuna Lettuce Pak choi

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