Still a household favorite

Drew Brining of Hammonton is only 12, but already he's signed up with the Southern New Jersey African Violet Club. He's even breeding his own plants.

It helps that his mother, Donna, is club president and owner of Fancy Bloomers, an African violet business. Still, he's unusual on two fronts: He's young and he's male in a segment of the horticultural world saddled with a "little old lady" image that just won't quit.

Back in the '50s and '60s, when the craze peaked, African violets were the favorite of stay-at-home moms and grandmothers. As Ruth Rumsey, editor of African Violet Magazine, puts it: "These were the ladies who used to put on their hats and gloves and go to the lunches."

Today, the African Violet Society of America is down to 6,000 members, from a high of 20,000 back in the day, and they're working hard to shed that "old lady" reputation. Meanwhile, the number of violet breeders catering to collectors has shrunk from more than 75 in the 1950s to just a handful today.

Yet new and unusual African violets still captivate a hardy band of enthusiasts. And thanks to an exploding interest in hybridization that began in the 1980s, mass-produced variations of the genus Saintpaulia ionantha are available for as little as $1 a plant.

"And they're sold just about everywhere," says Trisha Spagnuolo of Marlton, a collector who grew up surrounded by violet-growing women and now heads Burlington County's violet club.

More than 16,000 registered varieties are out there, plus plenty of free agents, and African violets are considered the world's most popular blooming houseplant. While hobbyists typically share with each other or buy at shows, from breeders, or online, there's a blizzard of choices for amateurs on eBay and in grocery stores and big boxes, many developed by Holtkamp Greenhouses in Nashville.

These no-frills, mass-marketed plants are sometimes dismissed as "supermarket violets" or "noids," for "no I.D.'s" or identification. "People are just buying them as disposable blooming plants, a cash crop. If they stop blooming, they throw them away," says Georgene Albright of Oakdale, Pa., a master floral designer at Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh and a columnist for African Violet Magazine for more than 20 years.

But the "noids" have exposed new generations to a plant that once caused near-stampedes at flower shows. And who knows? Some of these supermarket buyers could go on to become collectors.