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Possibly the commonest of the Parma Violets. Excellent scent and rather shiny foliage. Vigorous and floriferous. Roy Coombs wrote in 'The Plantsman': "'Marie Louise', named after the Hapsburg princess of Austria-Hungary, Maria Louisa, Napoleon Bonaparte's second wife, was raised in the mid nineteenth century. The violet that is now sold under than name in this country and the USA (Coon) produces flowers with white centres, the principal colour quite a dark purplish blue with slight, irregular, reddish pink streaks on a few petals, not necessarily just near the centre of the flower, though this has been claimed. Sometimes flowers are produced seemingly without these streaks, but always so far, after diligent searching, they have been found. This then is the currently offered 'Marie louise', but is the naming correct? Certainly, descriptions by the leading authorities usually tally with the above: the misses Allen-Brown and Mrs Zambra referred to splashes od red on a deep bluish purple or rich blue ground, James C. House wrote of little touches of 'fire' in the spring on an intense purplish blue ground colour and Miss Jekyll declared that the flowers were defaced by the inharmonious reddish colour of some small petals contrasting with the rich purple of the remainder. However, Roy Genders wrote that the flowers were lavender blue with a conspicuous white centre - no mention of deeply coloured petals and no mention of reddish streaks or splashes, or indeed 'fire', inharmonious or otherwise. The description I suggest is the correct one for the true 'Marie Louise' as it is the same as that by M. van Houtte in 1870, only a few years after the cultivar was introduced by Schuer of Heidelburg in the Grand duchy of Baden. The cultivar now so often grown as 'Marie Louise' is therefore misnamed: a confusion for which its present-day growers are not responsible as it dates back at least to the 1880s. It should however not be assumed that all lavender blue Parma violets are the true 'Marie Louise', as some such as 'Duchesse de Parme' and 'Lady Hume Campbell' are distinct." |
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| 25th February 2007 | ||
