Viola tricolorL.

Wild Pansy

WFO wfo-0000424643 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Viola tricolor, photographed by Pete Bradshaw
fig. a Pete Bradshaw, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-09 / obs. 204827854
Viola tricolor, photographed by Aleksey Shumkov
fig. b Aleksey Shumkov, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205790361
Viola tricolor, photographed by Вячеслав Юсупов
fig. c Вячеслав Юсупов, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203415213
Viola tricolor, photographed by Pavel Kacl
fig. d Pavel Kacl, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205846136
Viola tricolor, photographed by Иван Шихалев
fig. e Иван Шихалев, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203598780
Viola tricolor, photographed by tuohinopsakki
fig. f tuohinopsakki, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203794251
Viola tricolor, photographed by Юрий Носков
fig. g Юрий Носков, CC0 1.0 / obs. 201600368
Viola tricolor, photographed by Tomas Pocius
fig. h Tomas Pocius, CC0 1.0 / obs. 202405478

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 = 5,202 observations

Peak flowering in Jun, from 5,202 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 57 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.

  • Ion tricolor Medik.
  • Jacea tricolor (L.) Opiz
  • Mnemion alpestre Fourr.
  • Mnemion elegans Spach
  • Mnemion nemausense (Jord.) Fourr.
  • Mnemion sagotii (Jord.) Fourr.
  • Mnemion tricolor (L.) Spach
  • Mnemion variatum Fourr.
  • Viola ammotropha (Wittr.) E.H.L.Krause
  • Viola banatica Kit. ex Roem. & Schult.
  • Viola bella Gren. ex Gren. & Godr.
  • Viola bielziana Schur
  • Viola curtisii E.Forst.
  • Viola deminuta Schur
  • Viola derelicta Jord.
  • Viola elisabethae Klokov
  • Viola foucaudii Sav.
  • Viola garganica Strobl
  • Viola grandiflora L.
  • Viola lejeunei Jord.
  • Viola lepida Jord.
  • Viola leptoceras Schur
  • Viola lilascens Heldr. ex Boiss.
  • Viola litoralis Spreng.

and 33 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.