A Tanzanian Cloud-Forest Herb and Its Accidental Fame

The African violet is not a violet at all. It belongs to the Gesneriaceae, the family of the gloxinias and streptocarpus, and modern molecular work has moved the old genus Saintpaulia inside Streptocarpus as a section of that genus. Its home is a very small one: the humid, shaded rock faces and cloud forests of the Eastern Arc mountains of Tanzania and the adjoining hills of Kenya, where several of the wild species are narrowly endemic and now classed as threatened by forest clearance.

The plant reached Europe when Walter von Saint Paul-Illaire, a district official in German East Africa, sent seed home in 1892, and the genus was named for his family. From a handful of wild collections the nursery trade bred one of the most widely grown of all house plants, so that a rare mountain herb of a single small region became a fixture of windowsills across the world. This is the double character worth holding on to: a conservation concern in the wild and a commonplace in cultivation.