Come midwinter last year, thoughts of spring flowers began to float through my gardener’s brain. With my northern garden covered in ice and snow, I headed to the basement, set up the indoor grow lights and decided to plant one of the prettiest of spring flowers – pansies.

To be honest, I had an ulterior plan in mind for their sweet flower faces. After admiring them, my intention was to eat them. As a home cook, edible flowers are not usually on my menu, but every once in a while I crave pretty flowers served as a garnish on a salad or as a special decoration on a summery cake or tart. It’s not easy to find pesticide-free, edible flowers for sale. And even when they can be found, they’re often expensive so I decided to grow my own.

The plan was to transfer the young pansy plants from their artificial setting to the outdoors in early spring (they grow best at lower spring temperatures), where they would decorate pots and containers with bright pops of cheery color: deep gold, sapphire blue, royal purple, creamy white and other shades. I would snip off a few blooms as edibles. Even if a light frost occurred overnight, they’d be just fine.

As it turned out, growing pansy seeds during the dark days of winter became a good gardening project and also provided the chance to learn more about their biological cousins – violas and violets.

Pansy seeds can be notoriously slow to germinate, anywhere from one to three weeks. For busy gardeners, it may be tempting to just buy a flat of flowering pansies after the snow has melted. However, if you plan to eat them, depending on how they’re grown they may not be safe for consumption.

But there are rewards for any patient gardener who decides to start with a few seed packets. With luck, you’ll raise healthy pansy plants filled with young buds that are ready for the outdoors in about eight to ten weeks. There’s also the pride that comes from displaying homegrown showy annuals that started from seed.

Pansy seeds have a better chance of germination if they’re planted in well-drained, moist, humus-rich soil and placed in a cool dark place until they sprout. I kept it simple and used a commercial seed-starting mix, covering the seeds in soil and checking every couple of days to ensure the soil stayed moist.

The next step in this winter project, along with regular misting to keep roots moist but not wet, was to expose the young shoots to artificial light to duplicate outdoor growing conditions. It’s an easy project, even for inexperienced gardeners.

I added a general all-purpose organic fertilizer to stimulate growth. Avoid adding one that is nitrogen-heavy. Nitrogen is the first number in the three-digit sequence found on fertilizer labels. Try 5-10-5 to start, otherwise you’ll end up with lots of green leaves and few flowers. If you don’t add any fertilizer, you run the risk of growing plants with unhealthy yellow leaves.

While there is room for fancy cultivars in my suburban garden, North American wild flowers, including violets, are welcome because they attract bees and butterflies. Native violets are more than a nectar source; they are the host plant for fritillary butterflies. Fritillaries, with their checkered orange-and-black design, are sometimes confused with monarch butterflies because they look similar.

Without violets, there would be no fritillaries. That makes the North American violet a special plant for any nature-lover. Fritillary caterpillars hatch in fall and hibernate through winter. They awaken in spring when the violet plants begin to grow.