According to the Wisconsin Blue Book, school children in 1908 nominated four candidates for the state flower: the wood violet, wild rose, trailing arbutus and white water lily.

I was, after all, interfering with the violet's natural intentions – to turn from flower to seed and seed to future generations. In the big outdoors, it would have fulfilled itself just fine.

Everyone knows how the lyric begins: "Roses are red, violets are blue …" This poetic reference could be directly applied to the western Montana blue violet, which occurs widely in ...