Violets are Clever Flowers

by Kevin Strauss

While working in my lawn this weekend, I noticed small purple flowers poking through the leaf litter under my trees. Those flowers were common blue violets (Viola papilionacea). Their name literally means 'butterfly violet' because the shape of the flower reminded botanists of a butterfly. But for this small, purple flower, there is more than meets the eye.

This 3'-8' tall perennial plant grows its five-petaled flowers and heart-shaped leaves on separate stalks. It prefers to grow in damp woods, damp meadows and roadsides.

The violet's showy purple flowers that caught my attention, are actually designed to attract insect pollinators. The upper two petals stand like flags over the flower while the largest lower petal acts like a landing pad for pollinating bees.

But like many northwoods plants, violets don't put all their pollination hopes on the vagaries of the insect world. After the showy 'flag' flowers disappear, look at the base of the plant and you will notice a clump of smaller flowers. These smaller flowers pollinate themselves to insure a steady supply of seeds for the next year.

Once they produce their seeds, violets have to distribute them. Rather than relying on animals to eat violet fruits and deposit the seeds in their feces, violets take matters into their own stems. As the fruiting body of a violet dries out, the seed pod curls, putting more and more pressure on the seeds inside. Finally, the seed pod splits and seeds get catapulted up to four feet from the parent plant.

The common blue wood violet that lurks in our yards is related to at least three other northwoods species: the downy yellow violet, the early sweet white violet and the wooly blue violet. It is easy to identify the first two species by their color, but the wooly blue violet looks a lot like the common blue, except that it its leaf and flower stems are covered in wooly hairs.

While we have eighty species of violets in North America, the common blue is the one that most people are familiar with. Botanists divide this large and hybridizing group of flowers into two camps: the stemmed and the stemless violets. Common blues are 'stemless' violets, because the stem that holds the violet flower don't have any leaves on it. The downy yellow violet (Viola pubescens) is a 'stemmed' violet, meaning that it has leaves and a flower on the same stem.

So now that the robins are singing, it is a good time to get outside and notice the wildflowers sprouting around us.

The Ely Timberjay