WildBristol.uk - Discovering Wildlife in Bristol

Fairly common throughout the UK. Habitat includes: Grows on all but the most acidic soils prefering slightly shady places e.g. deciduous woodland. Particularly coppiced, hedgerows, heaths, moors, grassland, shingle, cliff and rock faces, railways, parks, cemeteries. Other names include: Dog-violet.

Confusion species: other violets particularly Early dog violet. Differences include: common dog violet flowers in From April, about a month later than Early dog violet in March or even earlier. In Bristol in the 'goat gully' and surrounding area the Common dog-violet does flower earlier from March onwards due to a micro climate. Also Common dog-violet has a pale almost white Spur (the sticky out bit at the back of the flower) where as on Early dog-violet it is the same colour as the rest of the flower.

from sea level to 1075m high in the UK.

Cleistogamous flowers are flowers which are able to pollinate themselves by using flowers which do not open. This behaviour is well known in Peas and Beans (Fabaceae) but the largest genus of cleistogamic plants are Viola. Only a few specimens of Viola are actually cleistogamic. These flowers are usually much smaller than normal flowers and they do not open; this saves using up valuable resources in making a flower large enough to attract external pollinating insects. Cleistogamy is normally a retrograde step for flowers since, by self-pollination, they are not using the ability of normal cross-pollination to increase the gene pool for better resilience against changing conditions or new infectious agents. But it serves a useful purpose in being able to survive in harsh conditions. Changes to the genes, do, however, occur even during cleistogamic fertilisation, but certainly not as many as by normal pollination