It's always a welcome sight to be greeted by the first Sweet Violets [the scented ones as opposed to the scentless Dog Violet] of Spring. Some may call them Shrinking Violets because of their close growth to the ground, but I would argue that they are anything but this. Their colour was chosen as one of the ones to symbolise the Suffragettes...green [Give], white [Women] and violet [Votes]
We have a local connection to wild violets here in Sussex. From 1905 to 1953 a Miss Ada Brown and a Miss Decima Allen ran their own wild violet nursery in the small town of Henfield. They exported their plants all over the world to places as far away as India and Egypt and had some very notable members of society [Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII] amongst their customers. Below you can see some examples of the products they made too.
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Violets were also given in bunches by children for Mothering Sunday
ReplyDeleteJulie xxx
I noticed that the local church had lots of pots of polyanthus in the porch for Mothering Sunday too. Hope you had a lovely day!
DeleteArilx
On my own but I did thank you. Spoke to my three sons
DeleteDarling Aril,
ReplyDeleteHow interesting all of this is. We had never heard of the use of Violets as a symbol in the Suffrage movement and how intriguing the historical connections are with Sussex and the Misses Broan and Allen.
As you say, they certainly do seem to have been women ahead of their time in many ways and could be considered entrepreneurs of their time.
As we are keen on researching family history, we had wondered about the absence of certain individuals on the 1911 Census, and now we have the answer. Another mystery solved!
That's why I enjoy blogging. One thing leads to another and I learn from the process and research all the time. I, too, hadn't known about the 1911 census prior to this. Arilx
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