For as long as I can remember we have had balloon flowers (Campanula) gracing our front flower gardens with intense color in late summer. And for as long as I can remember those blossoms have been a deep violet color (very satisfying for a Minnesota Vikings fan living in Packers territory...)
The archived photo above shows the traditional color (with the characteristic "balloons" that precedc the opening of the blossom).
This year some of the campanula exhibited all-white blossoms, and then two plants revealed the pattern shown in the top photo. These are not new plantings; all of our flowers are descendants of their predecessors because these plants are plolific self-seeders and IMO a joy for a lazy home gardener.
So my question to the readership here - is this a surprising development, and more importantly will the seeds from the plants with variegated flowers reproduce true next year, or will they revert back to a baseline all-violet or all-white?
Addendum: Two readers have appended comments noting that this is not a "hybrid" as I at first thought, but rather a chimera.
Since you have all the campanula growing near one another, none of them will breed true, as the other parent of their offspring might be a different color.
ReplyDeleteThis is not a hybrid. It's a "chimera." There was a mutation early in the development of the flowering stalk that disabled the pigment creating process in the cells that came from the mutated cells. You've seen a variegated philodendron... these have carried the mutation to each new leaf on the affected stems. About the Campanula seeds... it's possible that some of the resulting plants will produce all white flowers. (only those seeds that develop in the white segments of the ovary.) This would happen only if the mutation is carried in the maternal cytoplasm. If it's in the nuclear DNA, It will likely not survive fertilization by sperm from a blue flower.
ReplyDeleteIt's not a hybrid, it's a mutation known as a "chimera."
ReplyDeleteThank you, Margaret and chiativity. I had forgotten blogging the topic 16 years ago -
ReplyDeletehttps://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/09/chimeric-apple.html
Title and text amended.