Viola sororiaWilld.

woolly blue violet

WFO wfo-0001144694 Accepted WFO 2026-06 5 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–e

Viola sororia, photographed by Trix Niernberger
fig. a Trix Niernberger, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-12 / obs. 196983043
Viola sororia, photographed by David Bird
fig. b David Bird, CC0 1.0 / obs. 71676218
Viola sororia, photographed by Yann Kemper
fig. c Yann Kemper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 120296245
Viola sororia, photographed by Ryan Donnelly
fig. d Ryan Donnelly, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 125036297
Viola sororia, photographed by Steven Joyner
fig. e Steven Joyner, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 36801998

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 327 observations

Peak flowering in Apr, from 327 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 38 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Viola alachuana Murrill
  • Viola allardii Greene
  • Viola chalcosperma Brainerd
  • Viola communis Pollard
  • Viola cucullata var. alba Torr. & A.Gray
  • Viola cucullata var. sororia (Willd.) Torr. & A.Gray
  • Viola cuspidata Greene
  • Viola domestica E.P.Bicknell
  • Viola domestica var. communis Farw.
  • Viola familiaris Greene
  • Viola fletcheri Greene
  • Viola floridana Brainerd
  • Viola grandis Greene
  • Viola laetecaerulea Greene
  • Viola latiuscula Greene
  • Viola macounii Greene
  • Viola nesiotica Greene
  • Viola nodosa Greene
  • Viola palmata var. sororia (Willd.) Pollard
  • Viola papilionacea Pursh
  • Viola papilionacea f. albiflora Grover
  • Viola papilionacea f. papilionacea
  • Viola papilionacea var. alba (Torr. & A.Gray) Farw.
  • Viola papilionacea var. domestica Pollard

and 14 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.