The Beauty Of Pansies Brenna Estrada

“Pansies: How to Grow, Reimagine, and Create Beauty with Pansies and Violas” is Brenna’s debut book. She previously worked at Erin Benzakein’s Floret Flower Farm before setting out in 2021 to work on her own venture, Three Brothers Blooms, on Camano Island in the state of Washington. It was while working at Floret that she trialed hundreds of varieties of pansies and violas and fell in love with them. She grows pansies with long stems, breathtaking fragrance, and unique color.



“Ever since I was little, I’ve always loved flowers,” Brenna says. “The idea of a cutting garden was not something I ever knew about until later in life.”

As most people do, she grew pansies in the landscaping around her home and in pots. Her mother and grandmother had loved pansies, but they would grow the ones you see at the grocery store or the hardware store.

Those ubiquitous pansies have “little dark blotched faces, and they’re adorable, but they’re everywhere,” she says. “And there was nothing that really approached me as spectacular about them. They were just another flower.”

Career wise, Brenna didn’t find her way into flowers until she was 40. Prior to that, she spent 21 years as a first responder, first in the military then as a 911 dispatcher.

She calls her transition into flowers a “second chapter of peace.” She joined Floret seasonally before becoming a full-time employee, and she spent a few years there working for Erin.

“You’re hopping when you’re working there. There is a lot to do,” Brenna says. “She has a small dedicated team, and she always has a plan that’s a good 10 steps ahead of even the smartest mind. She’s brilliant with her forecast for her farm, so it’s a very busy place.”

When Brenna joined Floret, Erin was in the throes of multiple projects, including pansy trials to develop new varieties and cut flowers. Brenna was shocked to see pansies could be cut flowers — with long stems, various colors and ruffles. Brenna was reminded of antique postcards and paintings from the Victorian era depicting pansies that aren’t grown anymore.

“It kind of started to click,” she recalls. “Well, where did those pansies go? Why don’t we see them now? And if these are possible, what else is possible?”

That opened a rabbit hole for Brenna to go down. Erin got occupied with other projects, such as “Floret Farm’s A Year in Flowers,” and turned her pansy trials over to Brenna.

“Down the rabbit hole I went,” Brenna says. “So I just started going further and further and further and further in.”

She went into it with no specific instructions.
https://joegardener.com/podcast/more-to-pansies-than-you-think/

“I don’t think she had any idea where I was going to go with it,” Brenna says. “I think she just knew I loved the pansies, and I was doing my own home trials because I was also curious. I don’t think either of us had any idea what it would amount to.”

In trailing pansies and growing various seeds, Brenna came to learn how difficult it was to source seeds of exceptional varieties. She struggled to find books on pansies and to get answers to her questions on pansies.



Pansies are known for being a cool-season, compact bedding plant at the front of a border. But they can also make great cut flowers.

“It is variety dependent, and it’s dependent on how you grow them — and it’s not a new idea,” Brenna says. “… At the turn of the century, they were a very popular cut flower.”

Many pansy varieties that had been popular decades ago are no longer available because no one took an interest in saving the seeds and passing them on. This is true of many flower and vegetable varieties from the past.

“It’s like anything else that goes extinct without care and nurturing,” Brenna says. She calls these missing varieties “the lost sorts,” a term she picked up from a book.

Just since the time her book was published, four varieties she had written about were discontinued. “I want people to be able to keep growing these in their gardens, to not have to lose these varieties they love,” she says.

Really beautiful hybridized varieties are labor intensive to maintain. Saved seeds don’t grow true to seed, so the seed breeding and plant propagating must be ongoing and continuous to preserve a variety.

“They require a lot of devotion, and when that goes away, so do all those varieties,” Brenna says, noting that World War I and World War II halted that work.