Viola formosana

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Viola formosana, photographed by Cheng-Te Hsu — fig. b Cheng-Te Hsu, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 184270093

Viola formosana, photographed by Licheng Shih — fig. c Licheng Shih, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185846978

Viola formosana, photographed by 黃美滿 — fig. f 黃美滿, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 63791145

Viola formosana, photographed by Jerome Ko — fig. h Jerome Ko, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 40009715

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Viola formosana, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Taiwan	TAI	ASIA-TEMPERATE

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 159 in flower of 163 examined

100%

96%

100%

95%

Proportion of examined Viola formosana in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	11	11	100%	74% to 100%
Feb	24	25	96%	80% to 99%
Mar	44	44	100%	92% to 100%
Apr	52	52	100%	93% to 100%
May	19	20	95%	76% to 99%
Jun	1	2	too few examined
Jul	1	1	too few examined
Aug	1	2	too few examined
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	2	2	too few examined
Dec	4	4	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Viola formosana observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 159 of 163 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 10 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Viola arisanensis W.Becker
Viola formosana var. formosana
Viola formosana var. stenopetala (Hayata) J.C.Wang, T.C.Huang & T.Hashim.
Viola formosana var. tozanensis (Hayata) C.F.Hsieh
Viola hypoleuca Hayata
Viola kawakamii Hayata
Viola kawakamii var. stenopetala Hayata
Viola matsudae Hayata
Viola takasagoensis Koidz.
Viola tozanensis Hayata

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.