Viola pubescens (Smooth Yellow Violet)

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Viola pubescens, photographed by Tom Scavo — fig. a Tom Scavo, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-31 / obs. 202757447

Viola pubescens, photographed by Carol Ann Vermeer — fig. b Carol Ann Vermeer, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205056139

Viola pubescens, photographed by webohms — fig. c webohms, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204243578

Viola pubescens, photographed by Henry "Nick" Robertson — fig. d Henry "Nick" Robertson, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 198993734

Viola pubescens, photographed by Kate Cary — fig. e Kate Cary, CC0 1.0 / obs. 200515290

Viola pubescens, photographed by Lynn Harper — fig. f Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 199338509

Viola pubescens, photographed by Liren Varghese — fig. g Liren Varghese, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205024757

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Viola glabellathis one called it 3x compare

Flowering n = 4,305 observations

270

2012

1885

128

Flowering observations of Viola pubescens by month
Month	Observations
Jan	0
Feb	1
Mar	270
Apr	2012
May	1885
Jun	128
Jul	3
Aug	5
Sep	1
Oct	0
Nov	0
Dec	0

Peak flowering in Apr, from 4,305 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 19 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.

Crocion achlydophyllum (Greene) Kaczm.
Crocion eriocarpum Nieuwl. & Kaczm.
Crocion pubescens Nieuwl. & Kaczm.
Viola achlydophylla Greene
Viola eriocarpa Schwein.
Viola eriocarpa f. leiocarpa (Fernald & Wiegand) Deam
Viola eriocarpa var. leiocarpa Fernald & Wiegand
Viola eriocarpa var. sessilis Clute
Viola pensylvanica Michx.
Viola pensylvanica var. leiocarpa (Fernald & Wiegand) Fernald
Viola pubescens f. achlydophylla Farw.
Viola pubescens f. peckii (House) Levesque & Dans.
Viola pubescens var. eriocarpa Nutt.
Viola pubescens var. eriocarpa (Schwein.) N.H.Russell
Viola pubescens var. glabriuscula A.Gray
Viola pubescens var. leiocarpa (Fernald & Wiegand) B.Boivin
Viola pubescens var. peckii House
Viola pubescens var. pubescens
Viola uniflora var. pubescens (Aiton) Regel

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.

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