Violet

The sweet violet, Viola odorata, is a low woodland plant of early spring bearing small, deep-scented purple flowers half-hidden among heart-shaped leaves. That habit of blooming low and half-concealed made it, across European tradition, the flower of modesty, humility and hidden virtue, the shrinking violet of proverb, and in Christian art it accordingly became an emblem of the humility of the Virgin Mary and of Christ's modesty in the Incarnation. Its fugitive scent, which briefly overwhelms and then seems to vanish because it dulls the sense of smell, gave it a further note of the transient and the elusive.

The word violet did more than name a colour after the flower, recorded above: violet sits at the short-wavelength end of the visible spectrum, and Isaac Newton, dividing the rainbow into seven named colours in the late seventeenth century, chose indigo and violet partly to make the total match the number seven for its own symbolic resonance, so the flower's name for the colour at the edge of human vision carries an odd debt to Newton's numerology as much as to optics. Violet and purple are not, physically, the same colour: violet is a genuine spectral colour, a pure wavelength near the short end of visible light, while purple is a non-spectral mixture of red and blue that never appears in a rainbow at all, a scientific distinction underlying Newton's decision, noted above, to include violet among his seven named colours.

In Greek myth the violet was tied to Io, whom Zeus turned into a heifer and for whom the earth put forth violets as fitting food, and to Persephone, who was gathering flowers, violets among them, when Hades carried her off to the underworld, so that the flower carried a note of spring cut short and of death. Athens took the violet as its civic emblem. In the modern era it became the badge of the Bonapartists: Napoleon, exiled to Elba, was said to have promised to return with the violets in spring, and Corporal Violet became a secret Bonapartist token. Modesty, the Virgin, spring, the underworld and a hidden political loyalty all gather to the small scented purple flower of the woods.

Violets have a genuine culinary history distinct from their symbolism: candied or crystallised violet petals have been made as a delicacy since at least the nineteenth century, with Toulouse in southern France particularly associated with the craft, and violet flavouring, extracted as a genuine essential oil rather than the synthetic ionone now more commonly used, appears in traditional sweets, liqueurs and the violette de Toulouse confection still sold in the city today. Ancient poets gave Athens itself a violet epithet: Pindar and other classical writers called the city iostephanos, violet-crowned, a civic nickname that long predates and sits alongside the flower's later role as a secret Bonapartist badge.