Heartsease
Viola tricolor
Love-in-idleness. Pansies for thoughts. The flower pressed into Oberon's scheme.
Overview
Heartsease is the wild ancestor of the garden pansy, and it carries more than the pansy does: more names, more history, more strangeness. Love-in-idleness. Johnny-jump-up. Three-faces-in-a-hood. Tickle-my-fancy. Each name accumulates a different aspect of a plant that has always attracted attention disproportionate to its size — a small, tricoloured flower of disturbed ground and old meadows, whose association with love and vision and the loosening of reason goes back at least to Shakespeare and almost certainly further.
Botanical Notes
A variable annual, biennial, or short-lived perennial, 10–35cm, with oval, crenate lower leaves and narrower upper leaves. Flowers highly variable: typically showing combinations of purple, yellow, and white on five overlapping petals, the lower petal usually the largest with darker nectar guides. Found on disturbed ground, arable margins, old grassland, and rocky slopes throughout Europe. Hybridises freely with other Viola species. The garden pansy (*V.* × *wittrockiana*) was bred from this species crossed with *V. lutea* and *V. altaica* in the early nineteenth century; most cultivated pansies retain the wild species characteristic of opening whenever conditions allow.
Lore & History
Shakespeare knew the plant as love-in-idleness and gave it the central role in A Midsummer Night's Dream: struck by one of Cupid's stray arrows, its juice squeezed onto sleeping eyelids makes the waker fall in love with the first creature seen. Oberon uses it on Titania; Puck applies it incorrectly to Lysander; the plot of an entire comedy pivots on a small wild flower. Ophelia, distributing herbs at her dissolution, gives out pansies: 'that's for thoughts.' The French *pensee*, the English pansy, both derive from the verb to think. In the folk tradition it was used in love philters and carried as a heart-charm. The name heartsease suggests something different — not the kindling of passion but its relief, a plant used against heartbreak and grief as well as for the induction of love.
Warnings
Safe at culinary and standard medicinal doses. Contains salicylates and rutin; avoid in large quantities during pregnancy. Contact dermatitis is possible in sensitive individuals. The plant is safe as a food ingredient and in topical preparations; internal use of large concentrated doses is not recommended.