I have found the first violets! You need a few secret places, and eyes like a lynx, because they are still tiny.
Husband disapproves deeply of plucking flowers on a stroll. Of course I don't pluck protected flowers or dig out anemones, but from violets I cannot withstand: from a little dark lilac patch I cautiously take here one violet from a group of seven, there one of four - so the impression of a 'carpet' remains, I am never greedy, never ripping holes.
My friendship book monishes me to remain "modest, demure and pure" like the violet, "and not like the proud rose, which always wants to be looked up to". Even in those old school days that advice has never made sense to me - I had other aims, and was already too tall for the violet metaphor. But what I only sensed then was confirmed later in the garden: those seemingly modest ones often are from a rather prepossessing sort; silently and persistently they overgrow wide spaces, push aside others which maybe "proudly" giving up... What will The Poet tell us by that? Or Life? Be careful if someone is too modest, who clings to you till you cannot breathe anymore? And you are not even allowed to whinge, because they are so in need of protection, those Little Ladies who coquet with their diminutiveness but are bursting with life force under this tender wrap?
The violet does not love shade as many people believe, recalling the poem's line of "the violet in the moss" - and then think of darkness. Of course we find violets at the feet of hedges, but the violets that almost run riot in my garden have spread over the warm gravel walks. You have to read closely and be a gardener to let Christopher Lloyd's subtle sentence: "Sweet violets in purple, mauve, pink and white make themselves very much at home" melt on your tongue like a candied violet. Vita Sackville-West recommends violets as carpet plants, they embroider every lawn violet on many patches.
That much to modesty...
But the perfume of those few little deep lilac flowers is so intense, so dark and spicy, that one forgives them everything. Nine little violets succeed to fill up the almost four metre high room to the stucco with odoriferessness - for that I will forgive them even their overmodesty...
