African violet

What plants can bloom all year round? African violet is one of them. This is a pinwheel flowering African violet - a chimera. A chimera has different genotypes in different cell layers (L1-L3). For this particular plant, the L1 and L3 layers are white and L2 layer is purple, thus forming the pinwheel pattern. A chimera can only produce true-to-type offsprings by suckers. If you propagate it by leaf cutting, the pinwheel flowering pattern will be lost and the flowers of the offsprings will only be solid colored.

African violet comes in a wide variety of color and leaf pattern. The most common flower colors are blue, purple, pink but you can also find yellow, green, red flowers. The leaves can be variegated with white spots or all green. Both the flowers and leaves may have smooth or ruffled edge.