Credit: Rosemary Calvert / Getty Images
As any avid gardener will tell you, flowers and plants are full of surprises. You don’t know what will pop up sometimes—as one gardener recently found out.
They posted a photo of a home-grown rose on Reddit’s r/gardening forum and asked, “Why has my rose split colours?” The striking bloom in question has pure white petals on one side and rich burgundy ones on the other.
The poster goes on to write that they’ve “had this rose bush in my yard for 4 years and never seen one like this! I’m curious what could cause it. The rest of the flowers are a dark purple.”
Hundreds of fellow gardeners chimed in, with some even posting photos of their own dual-colored flowers.
As for the reason why it happened, one commenter said that “if it’s an entire branch, it’s a sport, a genetic anomaly that creates new colors or patterns in a particular variety. If it happens to one individual flower, it’s just an error in genes being turned on at different times in the one bud. Still very cool, but not enough material to make a new plant.”
Another poster expanded upon that theory, commenting that “roses are often bred from multiple parent varieties, so they carry genes for different colors even if they normally only express one. Sometimes a cell mutation happens and boom, you get a bloom that’s half one color and half another, or sections like yours.”
They continued, adding that “it’s pretty rare and usually just a one-off thing. You might never see it again, or you could get another funky one next season. Some people try to propagate sports by taking cuttings from that specific branch, but there’s no guarantee it’ll keep producing split blooms.”
All of the posters agreed that the gardener should enjoy the beautiful bloom while it lasts because they might not see another one like it ever again.
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