BCSS - Forum

I’m wondering if anyone has come across something like this. I have a Cheiridopsis albirosea (SB772) that I’ve had for several years and it grows quite happily outside in my climate. Typically it will produce the expected pink-ish colored flowers, but this year it has also tossed up an orange/yellow flower. Both are quite beautiful flowers but I’ve never seen this variation of color on the same plant. Unusual?

Are they definitely a single plant? Could there be two plants in there or perhaps a seedling that has grown alongside the parent plant? You can get somatic mutations that could lead to a different flower colour but they're extremely rare.

I've shown this picture previously.......

Dual flower colour plants are not unknown but rare.
Often colours differ because the flowers are different ages and the colour changes with age, but sometimes...
Cheers
David Lambie
Bristol

I think flower age is the most likely answer, whilst acknowledging other possibilities. Here's the same flower on a Cumulopuntia corotilla on the 8th, 11th and 13th of June.

I have seen variation in many plants over the days that the flower is open ..... but why is the colour change in cactus blooms, so wide?
Does the colour variation coincide with the acceptance of pollen ...or availability of pollen?

Most likely cause is temperature or exposure to light and/or air which will determine such things as oxidation levels of the colour compounds involved. This might even affect pH, which then determines colour.

Lots and lots of possibilities.

Hey all,
I think the “flower age” crowd is on point, to a degree. The pink-ish flower definitely turned a bit more orange with age. There must be some environmental component to this color change. Some flowers do a full color transition and some stay pink-ish depending on when they open up. We have had one of our “warm/dry Januarys” here (with no rain in our typically Mediterranean climate). Temperatures can go from the low 30F’s at night to 70F during the day (sorry about the use of Fahrenheit, they tried to convert us to Celsius when I was a kid, but we were too lazy in the U.S. to make it happen). It seems that warm days promote the orange color transition. Cool and overcast days seem to promote the retention of pink-ish flowers. It is an interesting phenomenon.

This spurs me on for one of the projects planned for this season. I have a small reflective spectrophotometer which I'd scheduled to use on some flowers this summer, as I too had noticed that the blooms varied across the summer and across the few days in which they flowered.
But how much of the colour is dependent on pigments, and how much on surface effects such as scattering and diffraction?