African Violet

The African violet is not a violet at all. It belongs to the Gesneriaceae, the family of the gloxinias and streptocarpus, and modern molecular work has moved the old genus Saintpaulia inside Streptocarpus as a section of that genus. Its home is a very small one: the humid, shaded rock faces and cloud forests of the Eastern Arc mountains of Tanzania and the adjoining hills of Kenya, where several of the wild species are narrowly endemic and now classed as threatened by forest clearance.

The plant reached Europe when Walter von Saint Paul-Illaire, a district official in German East Africa, sent seed home in 1892, and the genus was named for his family. From a handful of wild collections the nursery trade bred one of the most widely grown of all house plants, so that a rare mountain herb of a single small region became a fixture of windowsills across the world. This is the double character worth holding on to: a conservation concern in the wild and a commonplace in cultivation.

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.