Birth Flower (February)

Please click on your Birth Month for details of your Birth Flower

Violet

A Good Luck Gift to a Woman.
Modesty and Simplicity.
I return your love

According to a Grecian mythological legend, Io, a nymph and the daughter of the river-god Inachus, was loved by Zeus. In order to hide her from the suspicious eyes of Hera, Zeus changed Io into a white heifer (cow). Io began to cry because of the harshness of the common grass she was forced to eat. Zeus decided to create a new and more suitable plant for the delicate Io, and he created the violet by changing her tears into the sweet-smelling flower as a special feed for her.

During the exile of Napoleon I at Elba, in the year 1814, preceding Napoleon’s abdication, the French Bonapartists chose, as their emblem, the violet because of the Capitulation of Paris. They nicknamed Napoleon “Caporal Violet, the little flower that returns with spring”. Postcards picturing a bunch of innocent looking violets soon flooded France, but when scrutinized closely, the violets in the bouquet revealed the outlines of portraits of Napoleon, Maria Louise and of their three year old son, Charles, King of Rome. The French government fought, by decree on and off, until the year 1874 any reproduction of a violet because it was the symbol of the Bonapartists.