Some gardeners want short grass and they want all flowers to stay in their beds. This is part of the history of controlled garden landscaping. It involves a lot of killing. Just walk down the garden row in Lowe’s or Home Depot. You cannot avoid the smell of all the garden chemicals designed to kill unwanted plants, ants, slugs, voles, moles, and other small creatures—violets included, along with other broadleaf “invaders.” A lot of accidental deaths occur annually, too, like the second hatching of bluebirds. This event corresponds to roses getting sprayed for Japanese beetles. Bluebird parents eat the beetles, feed the hatchlings who then die right in the nest box.
Lois Tilden writes about invasive violets in the lawn on Dave’s Garden Web site:
“While some varieties of violet spread by underground stolons, the wild violet’s real secret weapon of propagation is by seed. And herein lays a strange tale. Many violet species, including the common wild violet, have two kinds of flowers. The first, normal [chasmogamous] flowers are the pretty ones we see in the spring. These are usually pollinated and set seed in the normal manner; this is how the wild violets hybridize with others. But later in summer, the violet develops a second kind of flower hidden under its leaves. These are called cleistogamous flowers, from the Greek for “hidden.” They are unusual in that they never open. Inside the closed pod, the flower fertilizes itself with its own pollen. The seedpods are three-cornered and held together with a sort of springy hinge. In fall, the pods pop open, flinging hundreds of seeds far and wide, often many feet away. The next spring, a mature violet plant will be surrounded by a horde of its seedlings, but it is likely that some of them are also germinating in the lawn.
Once the violets get into the lawn, they are hard to control. They are too low for the lawnmower to reach. The leaves have a waxy coating that resists herbicides. Some people add a sticker/spreader to make herbicides more effective, but I don’t know if this also makes it more effective at killing the grass. My own weapon of choice is a paring knife. Violets are relatively easy to dig out of the ground. In spring, the flowers give the location of the plants away and make it easy to attack. It is vital to get the violets up and out of where they aren’t wanted before the seedpods open. But most important is not to let them get started where you don’t want them.”
Actually, if you think about it, violets were here first and we are the immigrants or invaders. I try to remind myself of this when planning my garden against the tiny deer herd that has always lived in the region and treks across my property every evening in winter. But after seeing this winter’s damage to my newly planted balsam firs, deer are my enemy ... for some people it’s the pretty violets.
This year, with a newly purchased home—an old property with four gnarly old lilacs but primarily grass to mow—I am approaching gardening differently. As I wait to see just what the lawn on four sides of the house produces besides green grass, neighbors who garden by rider lawn mower are getting nervous. I have delighted in the violets on a damp portion of the south lawn, lots of dandelions to the north/northwest where the “soil” is 88 percent rock and where I can observe dandelion roots—nature’s way of breaking rock into soil. To the sunny east, a variety of wildflowers is just beginning to produce fragrant mixed bouquets.
Those dandelions are probably causing a lot of weeping and gnashing of neighborhood teeth. But these people spray for every non-grass weed so if seeds float over to other lawns they will be decimated. Eventually I expect to remove most of the grass or replant with various invasive ground covers and bird friendly trees. The goal here is to allow nature to take over a bit ... including the wild and sneaky violet.
