V is for Violas, Violets and Vinca
When I started on this month of flowers I had only planned to do one flower a day and it was easy to pick a flower per letter, but as I have gone along I’m finding it harder and harder to limit myself to only one! I mentioned yesterday the Will Rogers quote, “I never met a man I didn’t like,” and how I think that way about flowers and plants and so today there are three possible candidates for flowers of the letter “V”.
Violas and Violets are pretty similar except violas(and pansies) will flower as long as it stays cool enough and they have some water. Violets on the other hand are vernal…spring flowers. They give it their all in one glorious period and then spend some time making seeds and being green.
My paternal grandmother had violas (johnny jump-ups which I used for “J”) by her backdoor and they were always a happy sight. I like their ability to keep flowering during the ‘cooler’ weather here, as we might get snow. Once the snow melts back, there they are, still flowering. What they don’t like is heat and often by June they have ‘melted away’ in the Tulsa gardens. Since most people who plant them in the fall, use yard crews to do so, the same crews have come by in the spring and ripped out all the violas to replace them with the summer annuals. I let them go and when they get way too “leggy” they are usually ready to die a natural death from heat.
Violets are more ‘refined’ in my book. And there are so many varieties other than the ‘purple’ ones people think of when you say violets. I happen to have the purple ones and white ones too. Not sure how either of them got their starts in my front and back gardens and in the grass too. I’m all for them spreading themselves as much as they can. And I don’t mind picking them to put in small vases. They only last a few days once picked, but they look sweet.
And speaking of sweet, violets should have a sweet odor to them, Viola odorata, but mine don’t so I’ve just learned something…they are actually ‘dog violets’, which are native to north American and odorless. Click the link for more.
Viola labradorica
Just saying the name violet, makes me think of a show I was in “Pure as the Driven Snow”, a melodrama if you weren’t sure by the title. It was hokey and meant to be played for laughs and to end it, since it was so hokey, we sang “Sweet Violets” whose words one of the cast members had altered to fit the play and to be slightly risqué. And I suppose it is appropriate that the violets made me think of the play as ‘pansies’ are often linked with ‘thought’ in flower vocabularies.
The third “V”, vinca is kind of misnomer…mistaken name. If you look that name up you will find it is sometimes called periwinkle and there are annuals that also go by the name vinca that are a totally different plant. I’m referring to the ‘Vinca minor’ and ‘Vinca major’ plants which are vine-like and only really vary in the size of leaf and flower. My mother’s yard had ‘Vinca minor’ (small leaf). My yard has ‘Vinca major’ (big leaf). They spread by vines and flower in the early spring. They keep their leaves all year round which is one reason it makes such an attractive ground cover…it is still green when many other plants, including lawns, have gone brown or even died back. You can get a variety that has a variegated leaf, green with a white edge and that is often used in potted flower arrangements as the ‘spiller’. (Potting FYI if making a potted outdoor planting scheme…Use one dramatic plant as the ‘thriller’, one drapey plant as the ‘spiller’ and one thick plant as the ‘filler’.) Vinca makes a very good ‘spiller’ and that is how it got into my garden.
When we moved to Tulsa, the woman we bought the house from left a welcoming potted plant arrangement on our porch. I don’t remember the other plants in there, but vinca was the spiller and during the summer it does what vinca does…ran and spilled over the lip of the pot, off the porch and into the garden, where the runners rooted. (Oh I didn’t mention that part did I?)
Well unlike Houttuynia (which was mentioned in the last post) you can actually keep vinca contained, so I let it go and it has formed a filler at ground level for the front flower bed.
The picture below is from my neighbor’s yard. They are trying to get vinca (minor here) to fill in under their oak tree. It is doing a pretty good job but the area next to the curb is still bare. Partly this is due to street work a couple of years ago and I suspect the soil the street crew used to fill behind the new curb isn’t that great.
So three “V’s” for today.
