A violet by any other name

The pot plant  African violet, a cultivar of Saintpaulia sp.The plants get their common name  from their superficial resemblance to true violets Viola sp. but they are in a different family and are quite unrelated.

The genus is named after Baron Walter von Saint Paul-Illaire (1860–1910), the district commissioner of Tanga province who discovered the plant in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in Africa in 1892 and sent seeds back to his father, an amateur botanist in Germany.