Why Many African Violets are Unnamed Reprinted from the AVConnection (avconnectionn@egroups.com) and the July 2001 Ye Bay Stater, By Dr Jeff Smith                                         

I've been watching the discussion of having named plants from the commercial growers. You might not like to hear the following, but...Part of the problem with having the "correct" name and plant on Optimara and other commercial growers has to do with their growing system. When the plantlets are separated from leaves, they ESTIMATE how many pots will be needed for that cultivar. If they run out of plants, they just keep using the pots (now with an incorrect label) on the next batch they are potting up. Just because the pot has a label doesn't guarantee that the label is the CORRECT one for the plant. Always go back and match to their descriptions and catalog if possible to confirm the identity.

Ultraviolets plants may be the seedlings grown out of the hybridizing programs. They don't make the cut for further propagation, but they are perfectly fine plants. In these cases, you'll never be able to get a correct "name", because as seedlings they don't have one. They have also found that they can get seedlings to blooming size about as quickly as plantlets from a leaf. It's yet another way to produce a crop for sale as fast as possible. Only their "best" seedlings get named and propagated by leaf. If an Ultraviolet pot has a name, its one of these later plants, but here again the name on the pot may not match the described cultivar. Before all of us who want "named" violets condemn the commercial growers for their practices, you must remember that they are a business that only stays afloat if it shows a profit. The role of "named plants"for the commercials is entirely different than it is for the hobbyist growers. And a response to Jeff Smith's article on unnamed violets by Mary Walbrick is printed below:

Thanks to Dr. Smith for more information about how a large violet grower processes their violets. It is really difficult to envision processing thousands of plantlets as opposed to the several that we pot occasionally at our kitchen sink. Recently, I spoke with Dennis Kinzler who is with Color Star Growers, another large wholesale company with violet operations at Sanger, Giddings, and Austin, TX, and Ft. Lupton, CO. Their violets had absolutely no names. He went into detail about the huge machinery they used. Color Star sells to the Walmart and Lowe type of distributors who sell hundreds of very economical plants to Suzy and John Public. Just the people who do not care if a violet is named or unnamed.