18 FLOWERS OF THE WOODS AND COPSES 
burgh, Linlithgow, Mid and North Perth. In some of these it was 
doubtless introduced. It is wild in the east and south of England, and 
perhaps also in the east of Ireland. It occurs in the Channel Islands. 
The Sweet Violet is the very breath of the woods in early spring, 
and banks of violets with deep-blue flowers carpet the woods and 
thickets over the greater part of the country. One may pick the 
Lesser Celandine with the sweet-scented Violet growing side by side. 
Besides the shaded woods the Sweet Violet lurks under hedges along 
the shadier lanes or in the fields. Its existence near houses and 
villages has cast doubt on its being native everywhere. 
The Sweet Violet is generally social in habit, many plants being 
produced around an older one yearly by the loose procumbent stems 
which are put forth from the axils of the terminal rosettes, the runners 
being long and creeping. It is thus a prostrate plant, which extends 
itself laterally. 
The habit is the loose rosette or prostrate habit. The under- 
ground stems are thick, scaly, with rooting stolons. The plant does 
not flower the first year. The stipules are broad, lance-shaped, 
elandular, fringed with hairs, shortly pointed. The normal leaves are 
shining, heart-shaped to kidney-shaped, as broad as long, smooth or 
with few hairs. The estival leaves have the lamina and leaf-stalks 
slightly hairy, with depressed hairs, the lamina longer than broad, with 
an open sinus. Some or no leaves persist till next spring. 
The flowers are dark bluish-purple, fragrant. The flower-stalks 
are hairless, the bracts usually above the middle. The sepals are oval, 
blunt. The petals are egg-shaped, deep violet inside with a bluish- 
white base, dark blue outside with a deep violet spur. The green 
cleistogamic summer flowers are fertile, as are the spring flowers. 
The capsule is round, bluntly 3-angled, downy, often purplish. 
The Sweet Violet is rarely more than 6 in. high. May is the latest 
month in which it flowers, beginning in March. It is perennial. 
The flowers, though concealed by the leaves, are sweet-scented. 
The end of the pistil which bears the stigma is not globular, but like 
a bird’s head, standing a little distance from the lower petal, though 
close to and bent down into a hook, and fills the mouth of the flower. 
The pistil is pushed up by a visitor inserting its head below the stigma. 
The insect parts the ring of anthers and its proboscis is covered with 
pollen. The base of the pistil secretes a fluid which moistens the 
insect’s proboscis, and causes the pollen, which is dry, to adhere to it. 
The pollen is dry so that it may fall into the cavity, otherwise the 
insect would not touch it. 
