No pansies, no!

Stopped by Fortino’s Garden Centre for the first time this year.  It’s NICE that it’s open, I’ll give you that (especially on a blustery day when it feels like winter is turning around and heading right back for another stretch!). 

Fortino’s may not be my favourite garden centre, but it is certainly one of the nearest and most convenient, given that you can plunk your car in the parking lot three feet from the entrance and wheel out bags and bags of soil and amendments on one of their mega-carts.  Oh, and get some shopping done in the main store building while you’re there!

So, yes, I welcome it back happily every single year, and this morning, the kids and I paid it a visit.

But once you’re in, it’s basically the same Pots of Pansies that you see everywhere.

Pots of Pansies, and Emerald Cedar trees.

Ugh.  Pansies.

Frankly, pansies look like floppy hanky-flowers.  Like somebody wadded up a tissue and glued it to a bit of green.  The foliage is nothing special and the flowers are so huge and floppy.  I don’t mind violets and Johnny-jump-ups, which are all basically the same species, because at least they’re not OVERLY much.  If you know what I mean.

It’s not like the pots are arranged creatively, either.  It’s like they take as many pansies as possible, regardless of colour, and stick them in a rounded pot and sell it to you for – well, I don’t know how much because I didn’t get close enough to look.

Cuz you know what happens if you get close enough to look?  The pansies look BACK.  And not in a friendly way, since close-up, they look  exactly like ANGRY monkey faces.

Not cute zoo monkey faces, you understand, but the kind of rampaging cross-eyed monkey faces that might appear in a movie version of a Stephen King novel.