May 30, 2026
Author: Phyllis Root • Photographer: Kelly Povo
Violet season is fleeting. We’ve seen all nineteen of Minnesota’s native violets now, and we are working on definitively telling them apart. Green violet, once we found it, was unmistakable, but the others–purple, blue, white–can be baffling. Are stems sparsely hairy, partly hairy, very hairy, hairless? Are the leaf surfaces hairy only on the tops, or on both tops and bottoms, or just around the edges, which might or might not be scalloped? Is the beard (tiny hairs on the centers of petals) short? Are the hairs club-shaped? Not there at all? Visible with an electron microscope? Okay, that last is an exaggeration. We never carry an electron microscope with us. But some details are so minute that only in a photo or with a hand lens do tiny differences reveal themselves.
A 1957 article on violets mentions “the tendency of species to hybridize with their close relatives, producing a bewildered variety of intermediate forms.” No wonder the violets have bewildered us–they are busily interbreeding.
On a day promising to be blistering in the twin cities we headed north to track down several similar-looking violets–three purple/blue and three white. First stop: Magney-Snively Natural Area near Duluth where along a trail we found blue violets which we determined with close inspection to have club-shaped beard hairs. Since marsh blue violet is the only violet to have club-shaped beard hairs, and since they grew in a wet area, we could definitively say, Yep, marsh blue. Nearby we also found Carolina spring beauty, a wider-leaved relative of Virginia spring beauty, along with trillions of trillium, both large-flowered and nodding.
At Hartley Nature Center we found another of the blue violets on our list: Great Lakes violet. It helps that this violet is only found in the Arrowhead region of the state, and it helps even more that close looking revealed that the lower petal was bearded, unlike the similar-looking arrow-leaved violet.
We had one last stop to make at Sax-Zim Bog, where we both were absolutely certain we had seen kidney-leaved violet the previous year at the welcome center, just steps away from the parking lot. Either we had parallel memory lapses or the violets were already bloomed out. What we did find was a boardwalk through a poor fen, which we knew was a poor fen because last summer we learned which four plants were poor fen indicators. And there they were, all in bloom: white leatherleaf bells, white labrador tea flowers, pale pink bog rosemary bells, and deep magenta bog laurel flowers.
Though it might be classified as a poor fen, this was a habitat rich in plants. A small hummock of moss held its own little microhabitat, with creeping snowberry in bud and round-leaved sundew glistening in the light. A garter snake slithered away, then paused, perhaps thinking itself hidden, although its black and yellow stripes stood out against the greens and red of mosses. Somewhere a white-throated sparrow sang.
Along the boardwalk we met two folks and learned that, among other restoration projects, they had converted a golf course in Wisconsin into Three Waters Reserve, a restored prairie/oak savanna where purple milkweed grows. Purple milkweed, long gone from Minnesota (if it was ever here), has been on our wish list for years. We are already planning a road trip to go see it.
It was hard to take those last steps off the boardwalk, but the day was drawing down toward a long summer evening, and we wanted to make one last quick stop. At the Warren Woessner bog boardwalk we hoped to see stemless lady’s-slipper in bud, and we did, with their graceful leaves and curving stems and flowers almost ready to open. The plants along this boardwalk were more boggish, including three-leaf false Solomon’s seal and goldthread, and instead of hurrying back to the car we moseyed to the end of the boardwalk.
And there, at the very end by the viewing platform, was one white violet. Close examination revealed no beard hairs, which, along with its sparsely hairy, roundish leaves, identified it as kidney-leaf violet.
We’d set out to find violets, and we did. But we also found boardwalks across fens and bogs and met two people who work to protect and restore wild places. As one of them said while we chatted about bees and teas and butterflies and, of course, flowers: “Places like this give us hope.”
Some days that hope seems in short supply. But out among violets, bogs, fens, woods, wild birdsong, slithering snakes, bees, butterflies, and native wildflowers we did find hope and brought it home with us–as well as new clues to tell apart some of the (often happily hybridizing) violets.
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