Violets Come In Many Colors
Violets Come In Many Colors
Blue and Purple Violets
Lacking perfume only to be a perfectly satisfying flower, the Common Purple, Meadow, or Hooded Blue Violet (V. cucullata) has nevertheless established itself in the hearts of the people from the Arctic to the Gulf as no sweet-scented, showy, hothouse exotic has ever done. Royal in color as in lavish profusion, it blossoms everywhere - in woods, waysides, meadows, and marshes. It does best in cool, shady dells and flowers longer in meadow bogs. It has longer leaves than wide when it grows in swampy woodlands. The heart-shaped, saw-edged leaves, folded toward the centre when newly put forth, and the five-petalled, bluish-purple, golden-hearted blossom are too familiar for more detailed description. From the three-cornered stars of the elastic capsules, the seeds are scattered abroad.
In shale and sandy soil, even in the gravel of hillsides, one finds the narrowly divided, finely cut leaves and the bicolored beardless blossom of the Bird’s-foot Violet (V. pedata), pale bluish purple on the lower petals, dark purple on one or two upper ones, and with a heart of gold. The large, velvety, pansy-like blossom and the unusual foliage which rises in rather dense tufts are sufficient to distinguish the plant from its numerous kin. This species produces no cleistogamous or blind flowers. Frequently the Bird’s-foot Violet blooms a second time, in autumn, a delightful eccentricity of this family. The spur of its lower petal is long and very slender, and, as might be expected, the longest-tongued bees and butterflies are its most frequent visitors.
The lovely English, March, or Sweet Violet (V.odorata) is a wild flower mentioned often in older European literature. In France, it has even entered the political field since Napoleon’s day. Yale University has adopted the violet for its own especial flower, although it is the corn-flower, or bachelor’s button (Centaurea cyanus) that is the true Yale blue.
Yellow Violets
Fine hairs on the erect, leafy, usually single stem of the Downy Yellow Violet (V. pubescens), whose dark veined, bright yellow petals gleam in dry woods in April and May, easily distinguish it from the Smooth Yellow Violet (V. scabriuscula), formerly considered a mere variety in spite of its being an earlier bloomer, a lover of moisture, and well equipped with basal leaves at flowering time, which the downy species is not. Moreover, it bears a paler blossom, more coarsely dentate leaves, often decidedly taper-pointed, and usually several stems together.
Bryant, whose botanical lore did not always keep step with his Muse, wrote of the Yellow Violet as the first spring flower, because he found it “by the snowbank’s edges cold,” one April day, when the hepaticas about his home at Roslyn, Long Island, had doubtless been in bloom a month.
“Of all her train the hands of Spring
First plant thee in the watery mould,”
he wrote, regardless of the fact that the round-leaved violet’s preferences are for dry, wooded, or rocky hillsides. Mueller believed that all violets were originally yellow, not white, after they developed from the green stage.
White Violets
Three small-flowered, white, purple-veined, and almost beardless species which prefer to dwell in moist meadows, damp, mossy places, and along the borders of streams, are the Lance-leaved Violet (V. lanceolata), the Primrose-leaved Violet (V. primulifolia), and the Sweet White Violet (V. blanda), whose leaves show successive gradations from the narrow, tapering, smooth, long-petioled blades of the first to the oval form of the second and the almost circular, cordate leaf of the delicately fragrant, little white “blanda”, the dearest violet of all.
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