Meaning in the Flower Language and in Modern Herbalism

The African violet is too recent an arrival for the old herbals, which is why no classical planetary rulership attaches to it; Culpeper and his predecessors never saw one. Its symbolic meanings are therefore modern, drawn partly from the Victorian and later language of flowers, where it stands for faithfulness, devotion and a quiet, unshowy constancy, and partly from twentieth-century magical herbalism, which assigns it to Venus and the element of water and keeps it in the house for spirituality, peace and protection. Both readings lean on the same observed qualities: a soft, hairy, unassuming rosette that flowers steadily and for a long season in low light, indoors, without demanding much. Some of that reputation is also borrowed by association from the true violet, Viola, whose emblem of modesty and faithful love is far older; the two plants are unrelated, and the transfer is a matter of the shared name and the shared colour rather than of any shared tradition.