Violets

For some reason violets seem to like the soil conditions here. They grow so freely that we have to weed them out from some areas as they form quite a dense mat of ground cover and crowd out other plants (although one or two intrepid seedlings are fighting through in this photo). We keep enough to enjoy the delicate beauty of their flowers each spring. Mostly they're purple, as here, but there are a few white ones, and some in-between shades too. As ever with wild flowers, they need no help from humans to produce a perfect balance of colour and form that always delights the eye. Perhaps I might have evicted the dead beech leaves from this photo.