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Growing Specialty Cut Flower Pansies For My Garden

Thursday, August 20, 2026

Hello friends,

This year I'm starting a new garden project, growing specialty pansies and violas as cut flowers. With their frilly petals, unusual colours, and longer stems, many modern pansy and viola varieties are well suited to being cut flowers. The current Japanese pansy cut flower craze has made me curious to see what all the fuss was about. Over the coming months I'll be growing them, photographing them, and discovering which ones are worth the current hype.

Let's begin with the seeds I've chosen. There isn't a huge range of specialty cut flower pansy and viola varieties available in New Zealand, so I selected the best options I could find from local suppliers:

The varieties I selected for this project are:

'Moulin Rouge Mixed F1'
'Sweet Pea Mixed F1'
'Fizzy Lemonberry F1'
'Frizzleswizzle Mix'
'Gelato Salmon Red'
'Frizzleswizzle Raspberry'
'Matrix Sangria'
'Pandora's Box'
'Plum Antique F1'
'Rococo Frill Mix'
'Brush Strokes'
'Aalsmeer King Size Mix'

Because pansies and violas are hardy plants that don't mind winter conditions, I sowed the seeds back in July. It didn't take long to fill a couple of covered seed trays with sieved seed-raising mix and get them sown.

I've found that many seed-raising mixes contain surprisingly large pieces of bark and stone, which can easily end up sitting on top of newly sown seeds and interfere with germination, so I always take the time to sieve my seed mix before sowing.

Once the seeds had been sown, lightly covered with seed-raising mix, and labelled, the trays were gently watered and moved into the glasshouse to await germination.

It has been a couple of weeks since the seeds were sown, and the first seedlings have already begun to emerge, with more appearing every day. So far, germination has been encouraging. To protect the young seedlings from frost and snow (which we had a couple of weeks ago), the trays are covered with their plastic lids each night and wrapped in frost cloth.