LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM
THE QUEEN OF SECRECY
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
When I discover that I have missed the flowering of the round-leaved violets
whose yellow blooms appear in early May, I hurry to the stream bottom where
a gravel bar is covered with green and purple, an island of bloom in the
trickling current. I examine a deep purple marsh violet with my hand lens,
peering into the intricate construction of a soft, white chamber gated with
hairs topped with tiny glistening bulbs. This nook is an enchanting boudoir,
but the wider view of dozens of violet plants in flower is breathtaking. The
promise of new life that I saw in the earliest willow catkins and
wildflowers is rushing full bore to robust profusion. Already, the grasses
and herbaceous plants are overtopping the violets and will soon hide them
from view. Spring waits for no one. I need to absorb this first exuberance
of colors ranging from pale lilac to deep purple amid the rich greens of
unfurling leaves before the precious display is over.
Mid-western author Ruth Suckow reminisced about her childhood delight in the
first violets of a prairie spring. “Down one slope and up another— suddenly,
on the hillside, a bird’s-foot violet, another—oh, blue blue patches of
them! We were down among the flowers, our fingers sinking into the petals as
into pools of blue water, feeling the cool stems and the moist, secret touch
of the cooler earth. ‘Come here! … Oh, I can’t leave these!’ We called
rapturously to each other, with little sudden shrieks and sighing cries.
Voices drifted back as if from great distances, as if across water. A mystic
feeling seemed to set us far apart and yet drew us together with a joyous
secret bond. At first we exclaimed over each pale blue flower face, with its
fine black lines, its frosting of down, the faint red at its heart, but as
we found more, and more, and more, we could only move from one of those blue
pools to another, always finding one more perfect than the last.”
Those who have not experienced the joy in the display of early spring
violets may find this description childishly gushing, but the beautiful
clusters of purple hues along the stream and meadow edges make me as giddy
as that girl on the prairie long ago. The sight of a particular profusion of
low-flowering violet clumps intermixed with drifts of pale bluets, in a
corner where the stream runs close beside the meadow is lovely beyond words.
I must linger to relish this place. When I move along to the path beside the
meadow pond, I find the small flowers of northern white violets carpeting
the damp grass. Here I can add the pleasure of fragrance to my sensory
delights. A sunny dewy morning in May with violets ascendant—what treasure!
The beauty of violets is more than color, form, and perfume. The flowers and
new leaves contain substantial amounts of vitamins A and C and have
medicinal properties that have been used over millennia. I leave the wild
violet spread untouched, to enjoy as long as they last, and look along the
edges of the kitchen garden for clumps of profusely flowering
Johnny-jumps-ups to provide me with the culinary and herbal benefits of the
genus Viola.
These small blue, white, and yellow flowers, native to Eurasia, arrived in
North America with the first colonists and escaped herb gardens to spread
across the landscape. Hardy plants— although they are annuals, I have found
them blooming beneath winter snow—they grow and bloom in the earliest days
of spring. I add the new leaves and flowers to salads or to garnish soups
and puddings. By dipping the flowers in beaten egg white, dusting them with
superfine sugar, and spreading them on a platter to dry, I make instant
candied violets. I keep in mind that violets are mildly laxative, which
makes the plant a major ingredient in spring tonics.
A syrup made by covering and steeping the flowers with boiling water for
several hours then straining and reboiling the liquid with honey to taste is
helpful with cold weather coughs. This syrup does not have a long shelf
life, though, and must be frozen or canned if I want to keep it for winter.
The sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard wrote that violet syrup “has the
power to ease inflammation, roughness of the throat, [it] comforteth the
heart, assuageth the pains of the head and causeth sleep.” Ancient
herbalists recommended the syrup for epilepsy, jaundice, and tonsillitis.
Peterson’s A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants adds uses for asthma as
well as heart palpitations with the caution that violet syrup or tea may be
toxic in large doses. My favorite remedy recommendation comes from a folk
herbalist in the Carolina Smokey Mountains who advises her young interviewer
in The Foxfire Book to “Give a grouchy person a tea made from violet
blossoms.”
I depend on the visual tonic of the violet much more than the elixirs and
teas. The initial heart-lifting floral display disappears under the onrush
of taller summer plants, but violets continue to bloom and play a part in
the intricacies of the natural world. I keep my eyes open. When a bee
pollinates a violet, she lands on the lower petal of the flower, flips
upside down, and sticks her head inside the bloom to extract nectar. If I
catch sight of the quick efficient technique, I have to smile. Beneath the
previous year’s basal leaf rosettes of the violet plant, the tiny larvae of
fritillary butterflies overwinter and emerge to feed and grow as soon as the
new leaf growth begins. The caterpillars are nocturnal feeders, and each
spring I crawl about in the evenings, examining the fresh violet growth in
the light of a headlamp in hopes of finding a meadow fritillary or an
Aphrodite fritillary caterpillar munching away. I have not been successful
yet, but the hope I will be is an element of spring excitement. The adult
fritillary butterflies live through the summer, flouncing across the meadow
with their flash of orange with dark brown markings. In late August or
September, on the way to lay their eggs singly on the violet leaves, the
females add visual gaiety to the boisterous insect chorus. The seed capsules
of violets have three chambers and begin to swell on the tips of the flower
stalks in June. When dry, the capsules explode, shooting seeds abroad. In
summer, some species of Viola also form self-pollinating, budlike
cleistogamous flowers close to the ground. I have another excuse to sprawl
in the meadow as summer matures to look for these.
Violets continue to bloom, though not with the abundant show of spring, into
autumn, and this, I think, is their lasting worth—the unexpected brightness
that surprises beside a path, a tiny bouquet of purple flowers partly hidden
beneath the crowded goldenrod on the meadow edge, a single pale bloom in a
wooded opening in late summer—that jewel-like regal presence of Keats’s
“Queen of secrecy.”
