Viola sororia – Common Blue Violet

Common Violet is – well – common. It’s more than likely the violet that grows in your lawn; it’s the most abundant violet along roadsides and is frequent in wild areas as well. Like most violets it self-sows prolifically, creating naturalistic swales of color in the spring woodland garden. Violets are useful plants for wildlife. They are host plants of Fritillary butterflies; they provide nectar for insect pollinators and seeds for birds and small mammals; wild turkeys occasionally eat the foliage and rhizome.

A number of colorful variants exist – we have sold most of them at one point in time or another and have most as stock plants. Problem is they tend to drop seed more quickly than we can remember to collect them. Different species and varieties self-sow throughout our  stock plants and very often we do not know the identity of many of the seedlings. So we end up putting out violets as they start flowering and can identify them and it’s hard for us to predict what we’ll have in stock.