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Support the Flora of the Southeastern US

2024 has been a banner year for making the best flora we can imagine. We've created:
With financial support from people like you, we are aiming even higher in 2025. Together we can accomplish all this: Vote on our 2025 priorities
  • Add Global Conservation Ranks (GRanks) vote
  • Professional graphic keys (polyclaves) to individual families/genera vote
  • 2 new FloraQuest apps: Florida & Mid-South vote
  • Image overlays highlighting diagnostic characters with arrows vote
  • iNaturalist integration in FloraQuest vote
Write-in vote: vote
We've set a goal of recruiting 200 ongoing supporters to donate $15 or more each month in 2025. Please help us reach this goal and make next year's flora even better:

Click the number at the start of a key lead to highlight both that lead and its corresponding lead. Click again to show only the two highlighted leads. Click a third time to return to the full key with the selected leads still highlighted.

Key to Viola

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image of plant
Show caption*© Scott Ward
1 Plant caulescent (producing aerial stems bearing leaves and flowers at above-ground nodes).
  2 Corolla yellow, or white with a yellow center (sometimes fading or drying to lavender), ventral surface of petals commonly pink- or purple- to brown-tinged); stipules entire or erose
  2 Corolla wholly cream-colored, or cream with a yellow center, or pale blue, violet to purple, or multicolored (violet to purple with orange or yellow); stipules fringed or deeply lobed
image of plant
Show caption*© Bruce A. Sorrie
1 Plant acaulescent (with leaves and flowers/fruits arising separately from the rootstock) at spring flowering (V. rotundifolia is acaulescent during spring flowering and is included here, but it produces a stolon-like prostrate stem in summer with 0-1 leaf and a cyme with 1-3 capsules).
    3 Corolla yellow; leaf blades (sub)orbicular; leaf blades nearly or completely prostrate on substrate, especially during fruit
    3 Corolla violet, purple, blue, or white; leaf blades variously shaped; leaf blades (some at least on a plant) usually held well above the substrate (commonly prostrate on substrate during fruit in V. hirsutula and V. villosa, at least the outer leaves prostrate in V. fimbriatula).
image of plant
Show caption*© Duke Herbarium staff
      4 Plant producing stolons (stolons absent in V. renifolia); corolla violet, or white with greenish-white throat, mostly < 1 cm long in profile (> 1 cm, in V. odorata with white or purple corolla)
image of plant
Show caption*© theo_witsell, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by theo_witsell
      4 Plant not producing stolons; corolla violet to purple (lower three or all five petals blue in V. pedata, white with grayish-violet eyespot around throat in V. communis [V. priceana], whitish in V. floridana [“peninsular Florida” variant], white in rare albinos of many species), > 1 cm long in profile
image of plant
Show caption*© Gary P. Fleming
        5 All leaf blades undivided, margins merely crenate or serrate (pectinately serrate in V. pectinata; occasional V. edulis in early chasmogamous flower without lobed leaf blades will key to V. langloisii but has ovate-triangular sepals with shorter broader auricles < 2 mm long).