The common blue is stemless. The blue-flowered wood violet, white-flowered primrose-leaved violet and blue-flowered three-lobed violet are found throughout most of the state in dry or moist woods.

Another stemmed violet, the small, white to pale-blue American field pansy, often comes up in mowed grassland, sometimes so prolifically as to resemble a patch of very late snow to a passing motorist.

The common blue violet grows about 3- to 8-inches tall, producing 1-inch flowers that are white in the center with 5 distinct deeply blue-purple or white petals.

Roses are red. Violets are blue. But sometimes they can be yellow, too. Or even white. Roughly 20 species of violets grow in Illinois, and many have heart-shaped leaves with five petals on blooms ...

Other folks obviously feel the same way. Four states — Illinois, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and New Jersey — hold the common blue violet in such high esteem that it is their official state flower.

The common blue violet isn’t the only violet out there, although some of the others require much more searching. Give or take, there are about 26 native species in the genus Viola in Ohio.