When I plant pansies at all, I plant them in autumn and replace them with something that is more heat tolerant in May or June depending on when they start dying back in the heat. That's about all a home gardener with less than perfect conditions can expect from them in our climate. I garden in southcentral OK---so in zone 7b---and we get too hot too early for them to last into summer. Our first 100 degree day here was near the end of May, and my cool-season plants (dianthus, sweet alyssum and violas (a smaller-flowered relative of pansies) all started to go downhill at that point. I didn't even plant pansies last fall as we were hot and dry and it seemed like winter might be the same way, and for us it was. It might be different in extreme NE OK in a rainy year or in a cooler than average year. I don't know. I haven't gardened there.

If you are seeing pansies still in bloom and still looking good in commercial plantings at this point, I am surprised by that. Even the commercial plantings of pansies down here were ripped out and replace with other flowering annuals (usually angelonia, moss rose or dwarf zinnias, or with some of the smaller lantana hybrids) in early June. Any commercial plantings of pansies that still look good in our heat at this point are most likely to be from the Heat Elite series or Matrix series as those are about the most heat tolerant ones available. I assume they are getting daily watering at this point, or perhaps twice daily. I'm not sure if you could find either of those here in OK as bedding plants. You might have to grow them from seed yourself.

Swallowtail Garden Seeds has at least some of the Heat Elite line this year. Matrix is a slightly older series and seed is available from many online retailers including Harris, Stokes and Park Seed. I don't think that even Heat Elite or Matrix would survive my summers down here. I don't know if they'd survive yours further north, but they might if grown in morning sun with at least some afternoon shade and perhaps daily watering. There's nothing I grow that is going to get daily watering except perhaps for tomato plants in containers (and I have none in containers this year, so that's not an issue.) A lot depends on the weather in any given summer. We were pretty mild temperature-wise and very wet in 2015 so that might have been a good year to try summer pansies, but I didn't plant any. (Really, in my soil, they likely would have drowned with the 24" of rainfall we had in May 2015, so they wouldn't have made it to summer anyway.) It isn't just heat that is the issue--high humidity plus heat can make the plants literally rot so you will get different results in different years.

Some other pansy varieties advertised as heat resistant or heat tolerant include UniversalPlus, Panola and Dynamite. Keep in mind that the breeders have their own definition of what 'heat' is and our OK heat usually is much worse that what they have in mind.

I long ago decided to stop trying to use heroic methods to keep flowers alive here in summer. If they don't want to grow here in summer and if they cannot tolearate high heat and prolonged dry spells, I just don't grow them. My flower beds aren't totally xeric, but they are filled with flowering plants that can get by in summer on one deep watering weekly at best, and sometimes I let them go 2 or 3 weeks without water. Pansies just can't tolerate that much dryness in combination with our typical high heat.

So, while I don't think pansies are a waste of time in their season---from fall through spring, they are not something I devote space and water to in the hot season. YMMV.

Dawn

Thank you for the great information. I am in your zone. South central. I just think you are a touch more southern than me as it takes at least 2 hours to get to the red river from here. I grow mine from seed, swallowtail's, but not heat elite. They are the frizzle series. I had a hunch you might tell me they were better fall-spring. I think they must be replacing the pansies during these months but I wanted to make sure that was it and it wasn't me being a poor Gardner. And I can't agree with you more over seed companies "heat" and ours. Two totally different things.

It's been a lot of trial here since I am relatively new here and weather here is not like the south. When we first came here people told me, if you don't like the weather give it 5 minutes. It'll change. And it does. I feel like 5 years is not near enough time to gauge ok weather. Thanks again for letting me know. I think it's time to start my Chianti pansies for fall.

Karen, You're welcome. I can get to the Red River in 5 minutes if I go west (and trespass on the property between us and the river, which I don't, lol). Or, I can go east and slightly southeast (assuming I stay on actual roadways) and be there in 6 or 8 minutes. Or, if I go south down Hwy 77 and be there in 10-15 minutes depending on traffic.

We've been here since 1999 and about all I can tell you about the weather is that it keeps getting hotter and hotter in autumn, winter and spring than it did in our earliest years here. The summers are about the same. It always is hotter than it ought to be. (grin)

Good luck with the pansies. I had violas that looked superb until June and then we had a couple of really hot days and they collapsed and died in the blink of an eye. Some years the violas will last all summer. This is not one of those years.

Dawn

Reminds me to start pansy seeds for this fall. They don't usually last through summer even up here. Only if they get lots of shade, mulch, and tons of water, and then it's a maybe.