Tom's Life Bits

But African violet collectors lament the “noid” varieties. Posted on Fri, Oct. 16, 2009
By Ginny Smith

Drew Brining of Hammonton is only 12, but already he's signed up with the Southern New Jersey African Violet Club. He's even breeding his own plants.

It helps that his mother, Donna, is club president and owner of Fancy Bloomers, an African violet business. Still, he's unusual on two fronts: He's young and he's male in a segment of the horticultural world saddled with a “little old lady” image that just won't quit.

Back in the '50s and '60s, when the craze peaked, African violets were the favorite of stay-at-home moms and grandmothers. As Ruth Rumsey, editor of African Violet Magazine, puts it: “These were the ladies who used to put on their hats and gloves and go to the lunches.”

Today, the African Violet Society of America is down to 6,000 members, from a high of 20,000 back in the day, and they're working hard to shed that “old lady” reputation. Meanwhile, the number of violet breeders catering to collectors has shrunk from more than 75 in the 1950s to just a handful today.

Yet new and unusual African violets still captivate a hardy band of enthusiasts. And thanks to an exploding interest in hybridization that began in the 1980s, mass-produced variations of the genus Saintpaulia ionantha are available for as little as $1 a plant.

“And they're sold just about everywhere,” says Trisha Spagnuolo of Marlton, a collector who grew up surrounded by violet-growing women and now heads Burlington County's violet club.

More than 16,000 registered varieties are out there, plus plenty of free agents, and African violets are considered the world's most popular blooming houseplant. While hobbyists typically share with each other or buy at shows, from breeders, or online, there's a blizzard of choices for amateurs on eBay and in grocery stores and big boxes, many developed by Holtkamp Greenhouses in Nashville.

These no-frills, mass-marketed plants are sometimes dismissed as “supermarket violets” or “noids,” for “no I.D.'s” or identification. “People are just buying them as disposable blooming plants, a cash crop. If they stop blooming, they throw them away,” says Georgene Albright of Oakdale, Pa., a master floral designer at Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh and a columnist for African Violet Magazine for more than 20 years.

But the “noids” have exposed new generations to a plant that once caused near-stampedes at flower shows. And who knows? Some of these supermarket buyers could go on to become collectors.

“In a way, it's good that violets are for sale everywhere. We've got more people growing them, and they're practically in every home,” says Rob Robinson, who, with his wife, Olive Ma, owns The Violet Barn in Naples, N.Y., one of the few hybridizers left in the country.

“But it's bad in another way,” he adds, “just because it made violets less special.”

Tinari Greenhouses in Huntingdon Valley, founded in 1945 by the late Anne and Frank A. Tinari Sr., was once a powerhouse in African violet circles, introducing more than 500 hybrids to the market and growing 200,000 plants in six greenhouses in its heyday.

Today, says Frank Jr., who runs the business with his wife, Dee, “the box stores have changed everything.”

High fuel costs and impossibly cheap competition persuaded the couple to deactivate three greenhouses and end mail-order, which used to reach every state in the country and Bermuda.

They do no hybridizing anymore and grow only a few thousand violets for the casual buyer ($3.95 each), sometimes the children and grandchildren of longtime customers.

After 35 years of selling at the Philadelphia Flower Show, in a four-sided booth manned by 10 employees, the Tinaris stopped in 1996, when the show moved to the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

“It got to be too much,” says Frank, who has added orchids, firewood, and landscaping products to his inventory. Yet violets remain a favorite.

“Hobbyists are still out there,” says Dee, “but people now just like them because they're pretty.”

African violets belong to the mostly tropical Gesneriad plant family; they're not true violets at all, having acquired their common name because they came from Africa and resemble the wood violet.

In 1892, Baron Walter von Saint Paul Illiare, the district governor of colonial German East Africa, became the first non-African to discover them, in the rain forests of the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, formerly Tanganyika.

He sent seeds home to Germany, where they were first commercially grown. In 1926, a California breeder developed 10 new hybrids, known as “the original 10” species, from which thousands of African violet varieties have since descended.

The new kids barely resemble their ancestors, which were small, single flowers in the purple-blue-white range, with weak stems and drop-prone blooms.

The much-heartier modern violet is a wild-child mix of single, double, and triple blooms; rosette and trailer shapes; sizes from mini to standard; colors, including mauve, amethyst, cerise, salmon, and crimson; patterns, such as streaks, swirls, stripes, polka dots, and ruffly edges; and notched, scalloped, fluted, and variegated leaves.

“They're certainly getting more spectacular, and the combinations are getting more extreme,” says Judy Smith, a collector from Laverock and member of the African Violet Society of Philadelphia.

Breeders are chasing the elusive primrose-yellow violet and fragrance, as well as brighter colors, more and bigger flowers, and unusual leaves.

“You can't make a breakthrough every year, but we've always got to come up with something new,” says Robinson.

That's certainly driving Drew Brining, a sports-loving boy who's unself-consciously fond of violets. His current fave, the fuchsia-pink, gold-streaked Ness' Fantasy Gold, sparks fantasies of creating his very own hybrid.

“There's literally millions of possibilities,” he says.

If You Go

The African Violet Society of Philadelphia will host a violet show and sale this weekend at Lighthouse Fellowship United Methodist Church, 137 N. Easton Rd., Glenside.

The show runs

from noon to 5 p.m. tomorrow, and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.

For information, call 215-233-2579 or go to http://www.phillyviolets. org/

For information about other area clubs, including Springfield (Pa.), Burlington County, Southern New Jersey, and Garden State, go

to the African Violet Society of America's Web site (http://www.avsa.org/) and click on “Affiliates.”

Read gardening writer Virginia A. Smith's blog at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/gardening

Contact garden writer Virginia A. Smith at 215-854-5720 or vsmith@phillynews.com.