SUB UMBRA FLORET
A fellowship of gardeners, naturalists, and neighbors devoted to the protection and gentle proliferation of the common blue violet, Viola sororia, across the yards, meadows, and woodland verges of the United States.
Our Charge
The common blue violet asks for little and gives a great deal. It carpets the spring ground in amethyst, feeds the season's first bees, and nourishes the caterpillars of our native fritillary butterflies, which can take no other food. Yet the tidy lawn and the paved verge have driven it to the margins.
From its founding, this Society has held a single, patient conviction: that the wild violet belongs not in the rare botanic preserve but underfoot — in every garden bed, schoolyard, churchyard, and roadside in the land. We do not transplant rarities. We encourage the ordinary, and we encourage it everywhere.
We plant where others pave, sow as its own reward, and let the violet bloom in the shade.
A Portrait
Viola sororia · Violaceae
Modest, hardy, and quietly generous, the common blue violet is among the most widespread wildflowers of eastern and central North America. Its heart-shaped leaves form low, soft rosettes; its five-petalled blooms range from deep royal violet to the pale, freckled lilac of the “Confederate” variant.
It is a flower of remarkable cunning. In spring it offers showy blossoms to the bees; later in the season it produces hidden, self-pollinating flowers at ground level — cleistogamous blooms that never open yet quietly fill the earth with seed. To know the violet is to admire its thrift.
So beloved is this little plant that four states — Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin — have each claimed it as their own.
Our Work
We work not by edict but by encouragement — seed by seed, yard by yard.
Free violet rhizomes and instruction posted to any member willing to give them a shaded corner. The simplest act of conservation: a flower returned to the ground beside one's own door.
A members' post by which violets gathered in one county may travel to another, keeping the stock local, hardy, and freely given. No coin changes hands.
A standing census of wild violet colonies, recorded by members afield. Each sighting, dated and placed, helps us chart where the flower thrives and where it wants a friend.
Small grants and seed to schools willing to let a corner of the grounds grow wild, that children might learn the violet by kneeling in it.
Join the Fellowship
Dues sustain our seed stores, our postage, and our small grants. Every member receives the seasonal bulletin, The Violet Quarterly, and a packet of seed for the planting.
$50 / year
$100 / year
$500 once
Complete the form below and the Secretary will be in touch — or write directly to kate@wildviolet.org.
From the Journal
Vol. CXXXVIII · Spring
A few feet of roadside, left to its own devices for a single season, will astonish you. We make the case for the gentle neglect that conservation so often requires…
Read the entry →Vol. CXXXVII · Winter
The dormant months are the gardener's quiet labor. A practical guide to lifting, dividing, and overwintering violet stock for the spring exchange…
Read the entry →Vol. CXXXVI · Autumn
Why the great spangled fritillary cannot live without the violet — its caterpillars will touch no other leaf — and what the Society's survey has lately learned of their shared and quietly fading fortunes…
Read the entry →Receive seasonal seed, the Quarterly, and word of plantings near you.
We send only the Quarterly and word of plantings near you — nothing more.