Little Purple Flower

[monster]

Those may be what your family calls forget-me-not, SG, but they're not. Forget-me-nots have five petals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forget-me-not. Bizarrely, they are actually the same plant and have the same name US/UK. I know, I spend 85% of my time on here telling all y'all that it's different and that's due to top management, but this one time it is the same. As are snowdrops, tulips, crocus and hyacinths.

Those are little wild flowers my mum would've called Vetch (family joke, she called all small purple/blue wild flowers vetch )

Your new contenders either are real forget-me-nots,, or my inital thought- a plant I remember , but not sure I ever knew the name. They get a lot of cuckoo spit on them - a bubbly fluid made by insects who like that plant to protect their nests

[Juniper]

Yup, those are wild violets. I dearly love them. Violas are something different, but closely related. In the yard where we used to live, we used to get wild violas too -- looked almost identical to the wild violets, but some were splotched with yellow and a different shade of purple.

[Gravdigr]

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by monster

Those may be what your family calls forget-me-not, SG, but they're not. Forget-me-nots have five petals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forget-me-not.

It's not so much my family; the 'rents both grew up in London or its environs.
It's mostly a combination of schoolfriends, nature walks and I-Spy Wildflowers. Please tell me you know the I-Spy series? In the first case it was a knee-jerk "remembering" that was completely wrong. In this case it is honestly what we called them, but I am happy to hold my hands up and say we were wrong. They were blue ground cover that "we" called forget-me-nots and I'm happy to be corrected. I mean no slur on the I-Spy series.

Originally Posted by monster

Those are little wild flowers my mum would've called Vetch

I've heard vetch before - I'd accommodated that definition!

Your new contenders either are real forget-me-nots, or my inital thought- a plant I remember , but not sure I ever knew the name. They get a lot of cuckoo spit on them - a bubbly fluid made by insects who like that plant to protect their nests

The spikey ones have no cuckoo spit on them. I know cuckoo spit intimately, because The Field outside our house (now Bates Court) ran wild, as did we. I "knew" all the plants and insects and saplings, even if my knowledge didn't stretch to accurate naming. But am happy to accept them as forget-me-nots given the evidence; the blue haze over the school field (which was a mile long in my memory) was NOT forget-me-not. But it was prevalent, and seems to be nearly 40 years later. Good on it.

[monster]

There are so many similar plants, but forget-me nots are one of my favorite flowers, and they were my nan's. her garden was full of them, and she had loads of forget-me-not jewellery and table linen. I can't get them to grow here -other people have them, though, but mine never come back. , the other one, I don't know, I can't really tell from the photo, I think I hated the cuckoo spit so much I've probably mentally applied it to every similar plant

[lumberjim]

Originally Posted by skysidhe

oh ,,,and I didn't look!

well, where's the fun in that?