A Really Early Violet, Two Varieties

We haven't seen our native Common Blue Violet around here quite yet, although I do see their baby leaves poking up from my greening-up grass already.  Before long, they'll be adorning every alley and yet-unmowed lawn with their beautiful purple blooms, which (despite their native wildflower status) are not always appreciated by turf-grass purists or exotic-plant gardeners.  I happen to adore them and wish they would quickly supplant every blade of useless grass that remains in what I call my multi-flowered "lawn."  In the meantime, another beautiful species of violet has come into bloom, and today I hurried off to a local woods to admire them.

Although I admit to being a native-plant snob, I can't help loving the non-native English Violets (Viola odorata) that come into bloom almost as soon as the frost is out of the ground. For one thing, they've hardly proven to be invasive, since the two widely separated patches I've been observing for over 25 years have hardly spread at all.  An equally lovable asset about these violets is their heavenly fragrance, a trait sadly missing from many of our native violets. This fragrance is equally present in both varieties, white ones and purple ones.

The first small patch I visited consists solely of the white variety.  And these blooms are indeed purely white from the front, although (as this photo reveals) they do have purple spurs.

From the front, the blooms are absolutely white, without a blush or a tinge of purple.  Note too, the absence of dark veining on the petals, a feature of almost every other species of violet, native or introduced. Another distinguishing trait is a distinctively hooked style (which is barely visible in this photo but can better be seen in my photos below of the purple variety).

When I approached the second patch of English Violets (the purple variety) quite some distance away, I felt a jolt of dismay.  I had always found abundant numbers of them along a roadside ditch on the west side of Saratoga, but since my last visit, a huge White Pine had toppled across their patch. My sought-after violets now lay under a tangle of bark and branches that was underlaid by heaps of pine needles and sawdust nearly a foot thick. Not a single violet protruded from this mess.  Happily, though, some patches of them were blooming away at the edge of an adjacent woods.  Some sunlight reached them there, lighting up the vivid purple of their blooms.

Here's a photo that better displays the distinctive hooked style, a feature that is present in both color varieties of English Violet, the white and the purple.

And oh, that fragrance!  I could detect their sun-warmed scent even from a standing position. But I then knelt down to pick a small nosegay of them. Normally, I would never pick a flower I find in the wild, but these were growing in a trash-littered roadside ditch vulnerable to many abuses.  And as I have experienced, violets (both native and introduced) keep producing more flowers, the more the flowers are picked.  I would not be surprised to learn that these English Violets were planted here long ago to provide Victorian-era ladies the nosegays they carried to ward off the odors produced by the horse-drawn carriages that carried those ladies through these very woods. Incredibly, this tiny bouquet will perfume the entire room I will place it in.