PLANT : Saintpaulia

Saintpaulia, commonly known as African violet, is a genus of 6-20 species of herbaceous perennial flowering plants in the family Gesneriaceae, native to Tanzania and adjacent southeastern Kenya in eastern tropical Africa, with a concentration of species in the Nguru mountains of Tanzania. The  genus is most closely related to Streptocarpus, with recent phylogenetic studies suggesting it has evolved directly from subgenus Streptocarpella. The common name was given due to a superficial resemblance to true violets (Viola, family Violaceae). Typically the African violet is a common household indoor plant but can also be an outdoor plant.

Historical Introduction of African Violets


Early specimens of Africa violets had been collected by Sir John Kirk on the coast "opposite Zanzibar" in 1884, and by  the Rev.W.E.Taylor in the Giryama and Shimba Mountains in 1887.

In 1892, in Tanzania (then German East Africa), Captain Baron Walter von Saint Paul, the German Imperial District Captain of Usambara, collected a plant he called "das violette Usambara" (the Usambara violet). Captain Baron Saint Paul came from a family with a strong interest in plants. His father was even President of the German Dendrological Society.

Walter Saint Paul sent plants or seeds of the African "violet" to his father. His father gave them to Hermann Wendland, Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Herrenhausen in Hanover, Germany, and it was Wendland who wrote the first scientific description of the plant in Latin.

Wendland placed the plants in the Gesneriad family, gave them the generic name, Saintpaulia (in honor of the Saint Paul family), and the specific name, ionantha (with violet-like flowers).

Originally more than 20 species and subspecies of African violets were described.  In 2009 this number was reduced down to nine species.  It is from these species, their hybrids, and mutations of these hybrids that have come the thousands of cultivars that we enjoy today.

In 1893 the seed house of Ernst Benary, then in Erfurt, Germany, and now located in Munden, Germany, started to grow African violet plants commercially.

When the first English language description of the African violet (with a colored plate) appeared in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, in 1895, the statement was made: "It doesn’t often happen that a plant newly introduced into Europe can claim the honor accorded to the subject of this plate, of being within two years of its flowering figured in five first-class horticultural periodicals."

Commercial growing of African violet in the United States began in 1926 when Armacost & Royston of West Los Angeles, California, imported seeds from Benary in Germany and Sutton in England and introduced the plants to the trade. In the next 20 years, interest in the African violet increased among commercial and amateur growers to the point that in 1946 a national society was formed.