Where in the regular type violets, a single crown is desired, a trailers habit is to produce more suckers, they don't really trail per say like other plants, but grow to the side instead of upright. They were hybridized from a couple species violets with a trailing habit. The goal is to have more than one crown and to let the plant get bushy with most of the leaves about the same size. Each crown will bloom, so the more crowns, the merrier, ha. There are really two kinds of trailers, trailing-that need a lot of constant pinching and will grow longer stems; and semi-trailing - that don't need much attention and tend to just get bushy on their own.....no, I don't have a list of which ones are which and first class descriptions don't say either.
Once they have grown a long bare neck, it is usually too late to reverse that and the best thing to do is cut the crown off, to re-root it and start again with the rooted crown. Most of them are going to grow a neck sometime and will need potted further down into the soil. Oh, one other thing I read that I thought was important...don't remove any of the root ball when repotting, because trailers have a lot more top grown, they need all their roots to support the plant.
Truthfully, many of my trailers don't look very good. I tried a lot of different things I had read and was told, with very few successful results. When the club asked me to do the program on trailing violets, I said, oh no, you don't want ME to do that ! But everyone was getting a program idea, and I felt I had to participate...and in the end I was so glad I did. I really learned a lot. tish
PS> Thanks Jan! for telling me how to do the pictures! This is my Pacific Pearl...course in the picture it looks more "blue" but its actually purple and white.
