Photo credit: Baltimore Sun staff

I think I planted my first pansies in the fall five or six years ago.

A neighbor, who is a landscaper, gave me an extra flat of pansies left over from a job, and told me, to my amazement, that I could plant them and they would last the winter and bloom again in the spring.

They did. And I have been planting pansies in the fall ever since.

I was researching my garden column on pansies for The Sun, and I queried my fellow garden writers about them and got some thoughtful responses.

It is possible that pansies are not the innocent little flower faces that they appear to be, but a marketing ploy by growers to sell more product and to keep us gardening - and buying - into the winter, when sensible gardeners would be sitting by the fire.

That's kind of harsh, I guess. I don't like to think of anything I do in the garden as driven by the evil cast of "Mad Men."

But, to everything there is a season and I should be putting my garden to bed right now, not planting great swaths of pansies. I mean, I need to get a grip!

Nonetheless, as part of my research for the column on pansies, I learned that violas, with their smaller faces and their abundant blooms, might actually do better over winter than the giant pansies available now.

And so I bought two flats of violas to plant.