One wonders if the good ladies of the New Brunswick Women’s Society selected Violets as their Province’s official flower for its long association with love. From ancient Greece to Elizabethan England, these flowers symbolized love – particularly young love. They were even believed to have supernatural powers as a love potion.

In Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Violets provided the magical juice used by the fairies to bewitch the young lovers.

In one of those strange parallels, on the other side of the Atlantic the Iroquois people in North America were also using the Violet as a witchcraft medicine: if rejected by her parents, a vengeful suitor might use violets to drive the girl crazy.

Avenging broken hearts aside, violets were one of the key staple plants for Native North Americans. These small, unassuming plants had multiple uses for dozens of native tribes. As a medicine, its applications ranged from a reliable cold and sore throat remedy to a tonic for the blood and heart. Once again modern science shows us why it worked: Violets are one of the handful of plants that contain salicylic acid – what we call aspirin.

Nor did Native people overlook the nutritional benefits of Violets. Full of vitamins C and A, they were parboiled then fried or simply eaten raw. The fragrance benefits were highly valued and the roots were dried, then burned as incense at a potlatch.

Inuit people tucked the dried flowers into their clothing to keep fabrics and furs smelling sweet. Blackfoot people boiled a good blue dye from the flowers and used this to colour their arrows.

For centuries, before we came to rely on the dubious benefits of chemical pesticides, the Cherokee people used violets as an insecticide, soaking their seed corn in an infusion of Violet roots before planting.
One northern tribe even rinsed their dogs nostrils with a cold ‘tea’ made from mashed Violet leaves and stems. This would clear out their nostrils and allow them to sniff out prey better.

Native children invented some of the most creative uses of the flowers in their elaborate games. None of these was giddier than the Omaha children’s game of collecting baskets of blooms then separating into two teams. One team claimed their own band’s name; the other team took the name of a neighboring band. Sitting opposite each other they took turns snapping the flowers at their rivals until they ran out of blooms. The winners, the team with the most hits, had bragging rights until the next match.

Was it this rich native history of the Violet that tipped the scales for the New Brunswick Women’s Society back in 1936, or was it love that drove them to it? Either way, choosing a plant with this much power to benefit – and bewitch us – adds one more footnote to the long history of this fascinating flower.