Medicinal Monday - the Common Blue Violet

Viola sororia is known as the common blue violet that is native to the eastern U.S. and can be found in the late spring in Connecticut. This colorful spring plant is consumed by Native Americans and used medicinally.

About Viola Sororia
This plant is a low rosette-forming wildflower with elegant tooth heart-shaped foliage. The leaves and flowers emerge directly from underground rhizomes. In mid.-spring leafless stems rise from the foliage bearing a 1 inch blue-violet or white flower. The blossoms have five petals with tufts of white hair toward the base. The flower petals are marked with dark purple veins. In late summer inconspicuous flowers form at the base of the stem and seeds mature inside the self-pollinated closed flower that eventually drops on the soil.  These flowers have an elaiosome ( a fleshy structure that is attached to the seeds that contain lipids and proteins) that attracts ants! After the ants feed on the elaiosome they discard the seed, which consequently spreads the plant.  Violets are found in meadows, lawns, gardens, open woods, and on shaded banks and borders of rivers, lakes, and ponds. Some consider this lovely perennial a pest or weed!

Medicinal and Culinary Uses
Viola sororia has historically been used for food and for medicine by Native Americans for centuries. The flowers and leaves are edible and they taste somewhat like cucumber.  The flowers are slightly bitter with a floral tang. The most common use of this plant is to treat a headache with a poultice of leaves. An infusion is used as a blood medicine as well as to treat coughs, colds, and dysentery. Traditionally, the root is crushed and made into a poultice to treat skin irritations and boils.  Another way that Native Americans use violets is to mix the roots with corn seeds and distribute the mixture as a pre-planting insecticide.

Did You Know...

The flowers are rarely visited by insects, however, caterpillars of some species of butterflies do feed on the foliage.

Ants consume the proteins found on the seed and birds and small mammals eat the seed.

Other common names are blue-violet, hooded blue-violet, Florida violet, woody blue-violet, and wood violet.

Violets are the state flowers of Illinois, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Wisconsin.

Violets have many look-alikes, many are inedible or poisonous, so only harvest them when the flowers are present and you are 100% sure that you have a violet.

Violets were the favorite flower of England's Queen Victoria.

Until the early 1900s, violets not roses were associated with Valentine's Day.