Musings

Flower taxonomy

yard_violet.jpg

I suspect this is a dog violet; this type takes over our yard this time of the year (since we don’t do heavy chemical treatments, and, geeze, yeah, who manages to make time to do much weeding!).

I know some people are obsessed and/or fascinated by violets, but I only look at them once or twice a year, then move on.

So, I check my ol’ buddy Wikipedia for general reference info on violets, and find out they are more properly referred to as a group as violas (which I thought a musical instrument), and that pansies are a kind of viola-flower. Well, duh, they look like big violets, so I guess that makes a bit of sense, but I’ve also learned that simple large-scale morphological similarities aren’t always enough to indicate close relationships in modern taxonomics….