Little Purple Flower

What are these little tiny purple flowers that come up in your yard in spring. Leetle, teensy, things, about the size of your thumb. I've heard them called wild violets, but, I've also heard them called some kind of pansy. They do look kinda pansy-ish. But, also sorta violet-ish. What are they, anyone know?

I think they're violets. Pansies are rounder.

google images for violets:

http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=violets&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=g9g-m1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Violets. And they're tasty.

Ooh!
We get something quite similar!

Really teeny-tiny things compared to garden centre bought pansies or even violas. At school we called them forget-me-nots. But at the age I'm talking about, one person would say something with conviction and the rest of us took it as gospel. They grew all over the school playing field for about 5 days every Spring anyway.

ETA - I think what you have are violas, and I hazard a guess they're Viola riviniana or the common dog violet. I'm still searching for the ones I was talking about.

Thanx! I knew you folks were good for something.

Pie;648719 wrote:

Violets. And they're tasty.

Who'd a thunk?

Just make sure the dog hasn't pee'd there for a while. :yeldead:

forget-me-nots are a totally different thing.

btw, everyone's right -wild violets here, violas in the UK; lawn pest here, not so in UK; and pansies are also in the viola family

We've got zillions of wild violets in our yard. You know what? They a fuckload prettier than grass.

They look like a viola.

she said vulva....mmmm huh huh.

No but I probably said Virginia once when I was about 5.

oh ,,,and I didn't look!

I found we had them too!
From our back garden. I didn't even question them, thinking they were too pretty to be wild. Then again, they're not on our lawn precisely. Oddly, now I'm aware of them I see them everywhere.

Second pic is what we actually called forget-me-nots. I'm pretty sure they're the same as Mons posted - I think so, just that ours don't have as many flowers on them.

Looking at the two I can't believe I confused them. Still, the past is a foreign country and we've sealed our borders for now.

But here are some new contenders.
Not a great pic, but it'll have to da ya.
I don't know where to start in looking them up (unlike the violets, where I was confirming a suspicion)

They're on a spike, as oppsed to being ground cover.

Those may be what your family calls forget-me-not, SG, but they're not. Forget-me-nots have five petals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forget-me-not. Bizarrely, they are actually the same plant and have the same name US/UK. I know, I spend 85% of my time on here telling all y'all that it's different and that's due to top management, but this one time it is the same. As are snowdrops, tulips, crocus and hyacinths.

Those are little wild flowers my mum would've called Vetch (family joke, she called all small purple/blue wild flowers vetch :lol:)

Your new contenders either are real forget-me-nots,, or my inital thought- a plant I remember , but not sure I ever knew the name. They get a lot of cuckoo spit on them - a bubbly fluid made by insects who like that plant to protect their nests

Yup, those are wild violets. I dearly love them. Violas are something different, but closely related. In the yard where we used to live, we used to get wild violas too -- looked almost identical to the wild violets, but some were splotched with yellow and a different shade of purple.

:thumb:

monster;651182 wrote:

Those may be what your family calls forget-me-not, SG, but they're not. Forget-me-nots have five petals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forget-me-not.

It's not so much my family; the 'rents both grew up in London or its environs.
It's mostly a combination of schoolfriends, nature walks and I-Spy Wildflowers. Please tell me you know the I-Spy series? In the first case it was a knee-jerk "remembering" that was completely wrong. In this case it is honestly what we called them, but I am happy to hold my hands up and say we were wrong. They were blue ground cover that "we" called forget-me-nots and I'm happy to be corrected. I mean no slur on the I-Spy series.

monster;651182 wrote:

Those are little wild flowers my mum would've called Vetch

I've heard vetch before - I'd accommodated that definition!

Your new contenders either are real forget-me-nots, or my inital thought- a plant I remember , but not sure I ever knew the name. They get a lot of cuckoo spit on them - a bubbly fluid made by insects who like that plant to protect their nests

The spikey ones have no cuckoo spit on them. I know cuckoo spit intimately, because The Field outside our house (now Bates Court) ran wild, as did we. I "knew" all the plants and insects and saplings, even if my knowledge didn't stretch to accurate naming. But am happy to accept them as forget-me-nots given the evidence; the blue haze over the school field (which was a mile long in my memory) was NOT forget-me-not. But it was prevalent, and seems to be nearly 40 years later. Good on it.

There are so many similar plants, but forget-me nots are one of my favorite flowers, and they were my nan's. her garden was full of them, and she had loads of forget-me-not jewellery and table linen. I can't get them to grow here -other people have them, though, but mine never come back. :(, the other one, I don't know, I can't really tell from the photo, I think I hated the cuckoo spit so much I've probably mentally applied it to every similar plant :lol:

skysidhe;648968 wrote:

oh ,,,and I didn't look!

well, where's the fun in that?