Viola sororia: Uncommon Beauty of Common Blue Violets

Summary: Viola sororia is a New World wildflower native to eastern North America. Known commonly as common blue violet, the spring perennial is uncommonly pretty.

uncommon beauty of common violets (Viola sororia): Stephencdickson, CC BY SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Viola sororia is a New World wildflower native to eastern North America.

In Canada, Viola sororia claims homelands from the prairie provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba eastward across Ontario and Quebec. Viola sororia has threatened status in Saskatchewan, where a diminished population in a small area of the province's east central region testifies to the native wildflower's extreme rarity and local sparseness.

In the United States, the demure perennial ranges across all 37 central and eastern states plus the national capital in Washington, D.C., thriving from west of the Rocky Mountain states eastward to the Atlantic seaboard states.

Viola sororia is found in six Great Plains states: Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas.

Viola sororia is native to nine Midwestern states: Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Viola sororia claims homelands in four Gulf Coast states: Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Viola sororia is native to two south central states: Kentucky and Tennessee.

Viola sororia is found in the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., as well as in ten Mid- to South Atlantic states: Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.

Viola sororia occurs natively in six New England states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.

In addition to common blue violet, other common names for Viola sororia include: common meadow violet, dooryard violet, hooded violet, purple violet, woolly blue violet or wood violet.

Flowers and foliage emerge directly from the wildflower’s root system of horizontally branched rhizomes (Ancient Greek: ῥίζα, rhíza, “root”).

Leaves present a charming, easily discernible heart shape.

A single flower peers gracefully atop each long, slender floral stem known as a peduncle (Latin: pedunculus, “footstalk,” diminutive of pes, “foot”).

Flowers open in early spring, in March or early April, in a pretty profusion of blue purple, white or white-and-purple petals. Complementing the wildflower’s five petals are five green sepals, of which the topmost is quirkily recurved.

Native American ethnobotany recognizes Viola sororia as a food source and as a natural therapeutic.

Roots are considered edible but especially the leaves and flowers are favored.

The Cherokee of the southeastern United States included in their natural remedies the treatment of boils with a poultice of crushed roots and of headaches with a poultice of the plant's leaves.

In 2002, the Royal Horticultural Society, based in London, England, since its founding in 1804, bestowed its prestigious Award of Garden Merit (AGM) on Viola sororia ‘Albiflora,’ a pure white variety, for excellence as a garden plant.

Viola sororia is honored as the state flower of four states in the United States: Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.

Viola sororia first timidly appeared at the base of the European yews (Taxus baccata) flanking the four steps leading up to the eastern terrace that meets the curve of my yard’s gravel driveway. In April 2015 the northern half of the east terrace boasts a healthy, vast population of Viola sororia.

Purple, white and white-and-purple forms of Viola sororia prettify the terrace and also appear in the south lawn, from the south wall of my house southward to the yard’s southern perimeter and beyond into the south meadow.

Gorgeous purple Viola sororia flowers deeply blush at the north edge of the garden strip along the front porch’s southern end, bravely flourishing at the end of a lush row of orange tiger lilies (Hemerocallis fulva) against a wind-seeded, arboreal backdrop of box elder (Acer negundo) and eastern black walnut (Juglans nigra) saplings.

The floral display so charmingly evinced in common blue violets gentles landscapes with an uncommon beauty.

Blue-purple and white-and-purple varieties of Viola sororia ~ Pool Wildlife Sanctuary, Lehigh Valley, southeastern Pennsylvania: image by Nicholas A. Tonelli, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

uncommon beauty of common violets (Viola sororia): Stephencdickson, CC BY SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons @ http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Common_Violet.JPG

Blue-purple and white-and-purple varieties of Viola sororia ~ Pool Wildlife Sanctuary, Lehigh Valley, southeastern Pennsylvania: image by Nicholas A. Tonelli, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons @ http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flickr_-_Nicholas_T_-_Pool_Wildlife_Sanctuary_(7).jpg

For further information:

Moerman, Daniel E. Native American Medicinal Plants: An Ethnobotanical Dictionary. Portland OR: Timber Press, 2009.