Dear Readers, if you should ever be lucky enough to go to the Sunshine Garden Centre in Bounds Green on the 102 bus. you might notice a tiny area of green, with a few hawthorn and cherry trees just coming into bloom.
And if, while you’re waiting for the bus on the way back you happen to take a walk along the path through the little green area (which is sandwiched between Albert Road and Durnsford Road, you might notice that, amongst the lesser celandine and daisies, there are patches of violets, as you can see in the top photo. And furthermore, these are not any old violets, but sweet violets. If you bend close enough, you’ll notice a heady scent, which reminds me of parma violet sweets, and that perfume that all the gift shops in Devon sell (called, imaginatively, ‘Devon Violet’.
What an unexpected pleasure it is to find these flowers in such an urban area! And as I only had my phone with me to take the (less than perfect) photos, here are some better ones so you can see exactly what sweet violet looks like (though the smell should definitely give it away if you get close enough).
Sweet Violet (Viola odorata)
My Plantlife magazine this month has a useful guide to identifying our commonest violets. With sweet violet, the sweet smell is diagnostic, but you can’t always get close enough to tell unless you’re a bit more limber than I am these days (in spite of my pilates). One way is to get technical, and to look at the sepals – these are the green coverings of the bud before it comes into flower, and in sweet violet they are blunt with short, downy hairs, as you can see clearly in the photo below.
Sweet violet (Viola odorata) showing blunt, hairy sepals (Photo By Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1855012)
The other violets that you might see at this time of the year are early dog-violet (Viola reichenbachiana) and common dog-violet (Viola riviniana). When a plant has ‘dog’ as part of its name, it tends to mean that it’s an inferior version of a plant, hence ‘dog’ violets have no scent.
This is early dog-violet – note that the sepals are pointed.
Early dog-violet (Photo by Tico Bassie at https://www.flickr.com/photos/tico_bassie/3391334455)
Now, unfortunately for any one keen to identify to species level, the sepals on common dog-violet are also pointed, but to tell the difference, we need to look at the spur, which is the backward pointed part of the flower. In early dog-violet, it’s darker than the flower, whereas in common dog-violet it’s lighter than the flower (as you can see in the botanical illustration below). Simples! Except that I suspect that where the plants grow together they might hybridise, and there are probably other garden varieties of violet that crop up from time to time.
Common dog-violet
I find that it’s lovely to be able to put a name to a plant – for me, it opens a door to understanding more about it, and how it fits in with the other plants and animals that interact with it. For example, I had no idea that violets (in particular dog violets) are the food plant of so many of our fritillary butterflies, and it reminds me how vulnerable a little soft-bodied caterpillar would be if it was feeding on violets in a public place, where it could be trampled.
Pearl-bordered fritillary (Photo by By Iain Lawrie – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33507212)
Silver-washed fritillary (Photo by By Uoaei1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99733829)
Interestingly, I was with my friend S, and although I could smell the sweet violets, she couldn’t. There is a legend that you can only smell sweet violets once, which I find rather intriguing, as the scent of the plant contains chemicals called beta-ionones, which temporarily shut off the scent receptors. However, there is also a genetic component – some people can smell beta-ionone very clearly as a floral scent, whereas others are one hundred times less sensitive, and when they do smell the chemical it seems to have a vinegary edge. Fascinating! And of course, the sense of smell of some people who were infected with Covid has still not returned, or has been somehow changed.
Let me know if you’ve had strange experiences with regard to flower scents, Readers! I had one friend who insisted that freesias smelled of sausages, and I am ready for anything.
Dog Violet
I love these sweet violets! My mother used to grow them in her garden and the path to our school admin block was flanked by them. I would often bend down to pick a flower and put it in my work diary before starting a day of teaching. What you write about smells is very interesting indeed: I have always enjoyed the scent of these flowers, so I’m not sure about the legend. I am glad you could smell them at least!
Ah, the 102 bus – I know it well! I’ll tell my friend who is a regular visitor to Sunshine Garden Centre to look out for these sweet violets. In a few weeks’ time there’ll be a carpet of dog violets in the sculpture garden just down the road from us – in fact, looking at my photos from previous years, I see that sometimes they’re already in bloom by mid-March. There’s no sign of them yet this year.
I imagine a lot of things have been ‘put back’ by the constant rain, at least around here, though fingers crossed it hasn’t been quite so bad in Cornwall…
It’s just as bad here – it’s rained nearly every day so far this year! Mid-March isn’t usually like this – today would have been my dad’s birthday, and my mum used to take a photo of him in their garden each year, surrounded by daffodils in the spring sunshine