Most Popular Varieties of Small Purple Flowers
Purple has traditionally been the color associated with royalty and regality and that's why it is a popular choice among a variety of flowers. Planting a mix of purple hues in your garden can add sophistication as well as compliment more prolific tones like white, red, and yellow. You don't need to focus just on large, popular flowers like irises and tulips. Smaller blooms can easily integrate into your garden, window box, or even planter to add deep, velvety tones or softer, pastel hints of purple.
Some smaller flower choices that are high on the popularity list include pansies, violets, phlox, crocus, and hyacinth. The pansy is familiar and well loved, and happily springs up early in the season. Pansies range from deep violet to bright lavender and white. Monkey-faced pansies have a dark center while clear-faced pansies are one color, but most have a cheerful, sunny yellow center.
Tiny but powerful, violets have heart-shaped leaves and asymmetrical flowers and are hardy enough to sprout up in between rocks and in rough soil. Like pansies, violets can come in other colors such as blue, yellow, and white and are among spring’s first bloomers. Prolific and popular, violets are the state flower of Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.
Phlox are known for creating a thick, fast-growing carpet of ground cover. From spring to fall, phlox produce small, star-shaped blooms of rich purple. Phlox do best with moist soil, so are prefect for layering beneath taller plants and trees.
Crocuses bloom so early that they sometimes push through snow to reach the sun and spread their short, rounded purple petals. Grown from bulbs, crocuses will come back year after year with little attention or care.
Another purple favorite is the aromatic hyacinth. Resembling a spike of densely packed florets, the hyacinth has long, thin leaves and a powerful aroma. Hyacinths can be traced back to Greek mythology.
While there are certainly numerous purple flowers to chose from for your garden design, these few examples are popular, easy to care for, and among the first to reward you after a long, cold winter of gray and white.
