Elin wrote:
Cohan's reference to similarities of cultivars reminded me of the
article in the current Rock Garden Quarterly that featured pictures
of these curious plants. I was stunned by them. Their foliage looks
more like Sempervivums than the violas I grow with stems that grow
leggy with age. How could they possibly be related? In light of the
breaking up of the taxonomy of so many plants with very similar
features we are familiar with, how could there be any relationship
between these plants?
If you look at the flowers, not the growth habit, you can see that
you're definitely looking at a Viola species of the "violet" group.
If you're using "viola" as a common English name, however, it
typically refers just to the "pansy" group in the genus Viola, and
within that to the smaller ones, not the big horticultural bedding
pansies. I can't recall but perhaps Ger van den Beuken, author of
said article, wrote "rosulate violas" instead of the more usual
English "rosulate violets." (He isn't a native speaker of English.)
A good example of the trap of using vernacular ("common") names:
Viola is the whole genus, but "viola" is English for just one type of
plant within it. By the way, there are some corrigenda in the article.
Jane McGary
Portland, Oregon, USA
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