Pansies are fragrant as well as edible. They are grown in the Southwest and South in the winter and the North in the summer. They may be grown from either seeds or bedding plants.  The pansy is a descendent of the viola, a large genus with 500 species. Violas were known to the fourth century Greeks, who cultivated them for herbal medicinal use.  What we now know as the pansy started in Iver, Buckinghamshire, England. Lord Gambier and his gardener William Thompson, in the early 1800s, developed the pansy by crossing various species. By 1888, the pansy was labeled the most poplar flower grown from seed. Over the last half century, much pansy breeding has taken place in Japan, Germany, and the United States.