Johnny Jump Up

My mother loved Johnny Jump Ups. Her birthday was toward the end of March. As her birthday approached, she went out into the woods, looking for Johnny Jump Ups. They were among the first spring flowers to appear on the woods floor. Johnny Jump Ups are wild pansies. I don’t have any pictures of Johnny Jump Ups from our woods.

Generic yellow pansies. Grant [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Grandma Waschke cultivated pansies that she grew from seeds, mostly purchased from Tilllinghast’s seeds down in LaConner.

My mother had nothing against my grandmother’s cultivated pansies, but she had no passion for them either. My mother went to business college and learned to be a bookkeeper. Before she married my father, she was a bookkeeper at various businesses in Lynden and Bellingham. My grandmother grew roses and pansies. Mom tended the vegetable garden and searched for Johnny Jump Ups and Easter Lilies (Trilliums) in the woods and tried to transplant them to grow in the yard.

She succeeded with the trilliums. They grow well on the north side of the house. They are most likely up now, uncurling their leaves. They will bloom in a week or so, the white blooms turning purple as Easter arrives and the season wears on. There are blue, pink, and white violets in the lawn. Violets and pansies are the same thing, but the violets in the lawn are not Johnny Jump Ups.

In our woods, Johnny Jump Ups are small bright yellow flowers with a black accents that look as if they were drawn with a sharp crow foot nib and black India ink from the finest and blackest charcoal. The black in the generic photo above looks smeared compared to my mother’s Johnny Jump Ups. They grow in bright yellow and green beds on the bleached gray leaves of the woods floor. My mother succeeded in digging Johnny Jump Ups from the woods, generally under spreading big-leaf maples, and transplanting them to little clay pots she lined up on the window sill above the kitchen sink. The blossoms lasted a week or so and lived on as nice little green plants, but they never bloomed a second season. Pansies are perennials, but gardeners usually replant them each year, as my grandmother did.

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