Pansy, fascinating flower and soft subject for musing: the word comes from the French penseé meaning "thought". In the language of flowers leaving someone a pansy means "thinking of you". Pansies are popular in literature and poems, from Shakespearean allusion (in Hamlet Ophelia says, "There's pansies, that's for thoughts") to Robert Herrick ([1] & [2]) to modern poet Sharon Olds, whose My Mother's Pansies begins:

And all that time, in back of the house,
there were pansies growing, some silt blue,
some silt yellow, most of them sable
red or purplish sable, heavy
as velvet curtains, so soft they seemed wet but they were
dry as powder on a luna's wing,
dust on an alluvial path, in a drought
summer. And they were open like lips,
and pouted like lips, and ...

... and the rest is rather too risqué to quote here!

^z - 2009-05-10