What causes deformed and bizarre rose blooms?

This is day 871 of Lanyao's daily original articles

Article 70 in the rose growing series

A couple of days ago, a gardening friend asked Lanyao why the potted rose they bought bloomed yellow in the first flush, but after pruning, the second flush bloomed red?

I believe many gardening friends have encountered this problem, especially those who bought small rose seedlings. They often find that the flower color, flower shape and bloom size differ from the promotional photos, and they become doubtful, suspecting the plant is not the right variety, or is a fake.

Actually, the rose really is a magical kind of flower. The color and shape of roses are often affected by external factors, showing different traits. This is especially true of rose flower color.

Pink turning white, cup-shaped blooms turning into flat open blooms - for roses this seems to be a common occurrence.

Many gardening friends will notice that when buying seedlings, the picture clearly shows pink flowers, so why do the flowers they grow themselves come out white?

Lanyao grew a Misaki, and the flowers it opened in spring were almost white, and flat and open in shape, while what it opened in autumn was indeed a pink cup-shaped bloom.

Actually many pink roses have this problem, and some pale yellow roses also tend to open white.

The originally cup-shaped flower form also easily opens into a flat shape. So what exactly causes these problems?

What factors affect rose flower color and flower shape?

As for the specific factors affecting rose flower color and flower shape, honestly Lanyao really cannot draw a conclusion.

First, let's say that the roses prone to color change and shape change are mostly foreign varieties, including European roses, Japanese roses and so on.

Think about it - isn't there a huge difference between the geographical environment and climate of our great China and the original growing places of these European roses?

From this point of view, it is fairly normal for European roses to be a bit unsuited. Why do roses in green belts bloom abundantly with no one caring for them, while our potted European roses, carefully tended, still fail to bloom well? I think it should have something to do with "not adapting to the local environment".

Besides this biggest environmental difference, some minor environmental differences should also be reasons affecting rose flower color and flower shape.

For example, the influence of temperature: pink roses and pale yellow roses generally tend toward white in summer, and may even turn completely white. And the cup shape is also hard to maintain when temperatures are high. It can be seen that temperature is one of the biggest influencing factors.

But sometimes we find that when two roses of the same variety are grown in the same environment, the flowers they open may still differ in color, and even flowers on the same rose plant may differ in color.

This then requires considering some subtle influencing factors, such as the day-night temperature difference, pesticide spraying, fertilizing, soil environment and so on.

Some rose varieties change color as the flower opens, and are edge-colored varieties, while others are striped-color varieties, such as Monet, but their stripe pattern will also change under the influence of the external environment.

Overall, European roses are quite sensitive to the external environment, and many subtle differences can cause changes in flower color.

So if the flowers opened by your small rose seedling are not as pretty as in the promotional picture, you might first search on Baidu to see other gardening friends' roses of the same variety; that way you may feel a bit better.......

Actually Lanyao feels that many roses better show their true appearance in autumn, so you might as well wait until autumn to judge whether they are genuine or not.

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