The Little White Violet

Springtime (I think it is springtime now. All the signs point to it), is a lovely time for looking at flowers. Of course, most of the flowers around this time of year look like this:

One becomes very familiar with Taraxacum officinale subsp. vulgare when one has a little brother who thinks they are pretty flowers and consequently gathers huge bouquets of them, beaming proudly as he presents them to you. From a very early age, mine made the connection that flowers are things that you pick and give to girls you like, most notably (in his case) your mother and sisters. It's very sweet of him. I must admit, however, that in the last two years he has put together some very lovely bouquets with several different types of flowers carefully chosen to go together...usually with a dandelion thrown in there somewhere. But I digress.

Though dandelions are by far the most plentiful, I was convinced that they were not the only kind of flower to be found, so I went looking.

"There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something (or so Thorin said to the young dwarves). You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after."
--J. R. R. Tolkein, The Hobbit 
 

In my mother's garden I found some very picturesque bleeding hearts:

 They were not the something I was after. I wanted something smaller, rarer, more secret.

Then I found this:

It's a wild strawberry. They grow on the north side of the house and are very diminutive, but every year put forth their perennial effort boldly, even producing tiny fruit in June. The fruits are mostly seeds, but one must applaud the attempt. The wild strawberries also, cute in their miniature bravado (how many synonyms can I find for "small"?), were not the something I was looking for.

 

These were.

The white violets had hidden for years under a huge hydrangea bush, very secret, until once upon a time Dad decided that the bush was getting too big for its britches and cut it down. Several times. Only then did the white violets come out into general notice.

They never asked to be recognized. They were quite content to bloom completely hidden by the hydrangeas for a very long time, doing what they were made to do, being what they were made to be, whether anyone noticed or not. And that is what they still do. The only difference is that now their surroundings have changed so that we can fully see and appreciate their beauty.

I know a few very holy women like that. Do you?