Talk:Pansy

I'm confused... Viola is a genus, not a family of plant and the common name of Viola is violet not pansy. But then plants, especially decorative flowers, always gave me a headache in taxonomy class. --mav

I'm confused too. If it's a mistake I made, I apologize. I tried to paste in info directly from the ITIS page, but it's not my area of expertise.... wait a minute, I don't have an area of expertise.  ;-) Maybe I should leave the taxoboxes alone, aside from putting in the pic. They're constantly vexing for me. --KQ

No need to apologize. Plant taxonomy is really difficult sometimes and is often confusing, unless you are are expert in it (which I'm not either). I will take a look at the table and fix it later. Howver, most of the taxoboxes you have made are fine so don't let this discourage you. But at the same time don't feel obligated to insert them if making them becomes unpleasant. The text and the images are far more important. Yours in the wiki, --mav 07:00 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)

I've been eminently discourageable lately. Stress from creative endeavors not panning out. At any rate, thanks, I'll keep at it with the taxoboxes.  :-) --KQ

I moved the article because there are many species of flowers in the violet genus (and probably others) that are called pansies. Pansy now redirects here but should probably become a disambiguation page in the future. --mav

I'll defer to your judgement on it.  :-) --KQ (a writer, a photographer, a film buff, not a taxonomist)

Well, I'm not a taxonomist either so I could have messed it up myself. Flowers vex me. --mav

I'm a bit sceptical about this move, on several grounds. There are other Violas that are called pansy - but so far as I can find, they are always (something) pansy, e.g. the Yellow Pansy (which I'll do a page on soon, I've got a nice photo). The only other plant I've ever found that is called a pansy is the Pansy Monkeyflower, Mimulus pulchellus - very occasionally the "Monkeyflower" is dropped. To all intents and purposes the pansy tout court is always either V. tricolor or a hybrid involving it. Conversely, I have never heard a Pansy called a Violet Pansy - is this a US name for it? It must be a secondary name, anyway, because of "pansy"'s derivation from the French. Furthermore, and tellingly, both the text of the article and virtually every link we have to it refer to "Pansy" not to "Violet Pansy". So it seems to me the principal name of the page ought to be "Pansy".

On the other hand the wild type of V. tricolor should undoubtedly be called the Heartsease (or Johnny Jump Up in N. America, though that name seems to applied to several species) and not the Pansy. Maybe we should have separate pages, one on Heartsease (an interesting plant with a lot of uses in herbalism), and the other on cultivated pansies, both species and hybrid.

seglea 07:13, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)

subsequently modifed because I found some errors in what I'd written - how do you do that crossing out trick? seglea 06:08, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

OK, I have now turned the page into a pure garden plant page, and will go and write something separate about the Heartsease. But I won't changed the name, pending discussion with mav. seglea 06:21, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

'Pansy' is OK so long as it is really unambiguous. --mav

Name now changed back to Pansy in the light of the discussion above. seglea 19:29, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)