May 21: Gardening in Montreal, Plants from Africa

This is the big planting and spring gardening week in Montreal, which brings to mind flowers and the violets of the title The Violets of Usambara. Louise Brossard, who waits anxiously back in the Mile-End district of Montreal for news of her husband’s fate, takes solace in her African violets. She shuts herself in her garden room and loses herself in their beauty. That she is so enamored of them is important to the way the novel develops. Her dozens of plants and her experiments in violet breeding are a substitute for the control that she’d like to exercise on the world at large and her family in particular. From the beginning of my work on the novel it was clear that one of the things I should do when I was in Africa was visit the place where African violets are found in the wild.

Baron Walter von Saint Paul-Illaire, administrator of the Tanganyika colony for the Germans, collected seeds in the East Usambara mountains in the mid-1890s. He sent them home to his father, an amateur botanist who in turn gave them to a friend who propagated them in a botanical garden. By the turn of the 20th century the flowers had become the toast of horticultural shows all over the world. Their botanical name, saintpaulia, is tribute to the two German flower-lovers.

The Amani Nature Reserve is the best place to find wild African violets today, and that’s where I headed when I left Bujumbura. To get there I had to fly back to Nairobi, then take a flight to Dar es Salaam, arriving around midnight. In the morning I caught a bus to Tanga, Tanzania’s fourth largest city, stayed the night there and then hitched a ride to the nature reserve with a Finnish botanist. The trip was not without its adventures (see my story in The New York Times about how I missed the bus I intended to take but by early afternoon I was standing by a small stream beside which little purple flowers grew out of rosettes of soft, velvety green leaves. It was one of those moments when you just have to sigh and say: mission accomplished!

Photo: Wild African violets frequently grow on rock faces next to streams in the East Usambara mountains of Tanzania