Violets are to me, a happy childhood flower. The proper purple ones, not the variegated ones. I know their scent isn’t everyone’s ‘thing’, but to me the scent represents happy, uncomplicated, sunshine filled days with my mum.
Unlike Mum, I am something close to the world’s most useless gardener. I have tried and tried to grow certain things over the years – violets being one of them – and invariably I forget and neglect whatever I plant and hey presto – dead!
It would be 15 years since I last tried to grow violets. I brought little clumps of them home wrapped in wet newspaper in a box from Mum and Dads garden. You guessed it. Dead in no time.
So last year when I spotted a little group of green leaves poking through a crack in the cement under our back pergola I was excited when I posted here to clarify what they were, to see peoples consensus of ‘violets’!! My much loved little plant, growing all by itself, in a place I didn’t plant them popping up to say hello. They didn’t flower last year but at the time I was feeling low about something I’d been praying on for ever such a long time and when just these leaves poked through it was a personal smile from heaven saying to me “Look what I can do. I can raise what you can’t, in places you didn’t plant, at times when you’d least expect it.”
Today from the kitchen window I again saw the little green patch in the crack down the back.
The thing I’ve been praying on – still – has seen some radical movement very recently so I fully expected, and was thrilled but not surprised, upon closer investigation – to find two precious purple (not variegated) violets waving up at me.