Pansies are beautiful edible flowers, that make for an attractive addition to green salads as well as herb and grain salads.

Pansies have a slightly sweet green or grassy flavor. If you eat only the petals, the flavor is extremely mild, but if you eat the whole flower, there is a winter, green overtone. All parts of the plant are edible and are a good source of nutrients.  Use them as garnishes, in fruit salads, green salad, desserts or in soups. Pansies can be cooked down with sugar to make syrups and jams.

Pansies come in a bright variety of colours, white, orange, burgundy, yellow and purple.

Medicinally, Pansies have been used as a natural way to treat arthritis, headache and body pain as they contain salicylic acid, an anti-inflammatory that is found in aspirin. Syrup from Pansies was made to help treat coughs and colds.

These edible flowers can also be softened into a paste and applied topically to treat acne, eczema and other skin irritations. 

Pansy flowers have been used in herbal and Chinese medicine for centuries. Pansy has been used to break down the density of tumors believed to prevent them from turning cancerous. Pansy could ease headaches and their accompanying dizziness because one of the active ingredients in pansy is salicylic acid, the same main ingredient in modern day aspirin.

The edible flower Pansy is a beautiful little flower loved for its charm, versatility that adds a swath of gorgeous colours the surroundings. The modern Pansies come from the tri-colour viola (yellow, white and purple) a European wildflower.  The five delicate petals of the flower can be single or bi-coloured and are attached to a central core with short dark purple to black stripes extending outward from the flowers center.

The meaning of the pansy flower is loving thoughts, love in idleness, to think, free thinkers, remembrance, to consider, and the birth flower of February. The message of pansy flower is also to be of good cheer, a clear mind and calm spirit.

The pansy edible flower symbolizes the love or admiration of one person for another. The pansy flower is the symbol of the Free Thinkers Society, a group who adopt thinking free from societal constraints, expectations, emotions and religious dogma. The reason for selecting the pansy flower is that the word pansy is from the French word penser, to think.

Pansy flowers come in a wide range of tri-colours, solid and bi-colours.  Some varieties are a beautiful pastel shade of apricot, peach and shell.  Blue is generally an uncommon color in flowers except pansies, which have pastel shades of blue, violet blues, dark blues and true blues. Other colors in pansies include burgundy, deep orange, copper, purple, light purple, black, white and subtle variations of these colors.