Good morning. Today is octidi, the 8th of Ventôse, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate la violette, a large group of flowering plants that mainly share a distinctive color.
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Violets, as we will discuss in a moment, are promiscuous in their variation. The species stretches across large swaths of the globe in hundreds of native varieties, and hybridizes with ease. Any list of violet species is going to be mind-numbingly long, and because the flowers that help distinguish them are so short-lived, botanists don't always get a chance to pin a species down when in the field. For that reason, there's an abbreviation along the lines of "l.b.d." (little black dress) that botanists use: "l.b.v." for "little blue violet" that gets things right enough and leaves the details to someone else who's willing and able to laboriously catalog the plant's attributes and match it to one of the dozens – or even hundreds – of possibilities for that biome.
There's a huge advantage to being the first flower. When the weather allows for bees and flies and ants to re-emerge, they are hungry and busy. As we saw two days ago with asarum, those babies have voracious appetites and can be some of the most prolific pollinators of the year.
There's also a huge disadvantage to being the first flower. As anyone who lives somewhere with a true temperate springtime knows, winter never truly leaves until summer. The last freeze or the last snowfall is always determined in retrospect, after a generous month or two has passed to be sure. The first flowers are almost certainly going to be punished by the weather.
