I didn’t know “up close landscaping” was a thing until I discovered a page about a ruffled Pansy on the Proven Winners website. The plant was described on the site as “a frilly flower that looks great in containers and ‘close-up’ landscapes.” (More on those pansies below.) What is all this about Close Up Landscaping?

When you Google “close up landscapes”, the results are predictably not about landscaping at all but about capturing a detail of a landscape, up close and personal, through photography. OutdoorPhotographer.com has a great article on photographing the “intimate landscape”.

But I love the idea of creating a portion of a garden or a container planting to be enjoyed really up close. Designing a garden specifically so that you’d have to get down on your hands and knees to really appreciate what’s going on may be extreme, of course, but then anyone who has ever created a ‘fairy garden’, complete with tiny figurines of fairies and miniature models of imagined furnishings for a fairy community, is basically doing just that.

Adding tiny ruffles to an up-close garden

A planter I filled with pansies earlier this spring and one of the ruffled varieties.

Now that the weather is finally warming up and the patio furniture has been pulled out of storage, close-up landscaping in a container is a wonderful way to welcome spring–especially when you want to direct eyes at your lovely done-in-one-morning gardening project rather than to the rest of your garden which looks like winter kicked the daylights out of it. I love a tall container or one that’s been raised so that when it’s filled with plants they are right at nose height as you sit in your favourite chair. And the spring flowers that are perfect for this are pansies.

These old-fashioned charmers naturally beckon the observer to come a little closer with their enchanting ‘faces’ and gorgeous colourations. Evidently, not all pansies have a fragrance but yellow and blue ones tend to have a lovely scent that’s easiest to smell at dawn and dusk. So take advantage of this by positioning your chair and pansy-filled container in a spot where you’d want to enjoy your breakfast drink or evening cocktail.

Pansies with ruffled petals are actually Violas (Viola x wittrockiana). Proven Winners offers a selection of ruffled pansies, including Frizzle Sizzle Lemonberry, Frizzle Sizzle Blue and Frizzle Sizzle Burgundy. Ontario-based Stokes Seeds has half a dozen ruffled pansies offered as seed, including Frizzle Sizzles in Raspberry, Orange and Yellow/Blue Swirl. Is your mouth watering? Mine is.

The best part about ruffled pansies, however, is that they actually get rufflier in cooler weather–just the ticket for people like me who live where spring is slow to warm up but still want a fast spring fix.

These are the ruffled varieties I used in the container planting shown above. I also added un-ruffled Delta™ Speedy Frost Pansy, Delta™ Premium Blue Morpho Pansy and Sorbet™ XP Delft Blue Viola.

Happy spring planting!