Rose Buds Within A Rose?
by Kathy Ryer
Center area close up showing numerous smaller buds
QUESTION: Last fall, I bought a rose bush that starting to grow rose buds within a rose. In the beginning the rose had a green, grassy-looking center rather than a normal one. The rose itself was even a pale green gradually changing to a pale, milky pink. After taking it home and repotting it, it began to bloom regularly and I have been amazed to watch the results! Quite regularly, the blooms appear with the irregular grassy green center. However, now I notice that there are actually other tiny pink rosebuds wthin the rose that grow there! I am a teacher at the American School in Doha, Qatar, and just this morning I cut one of these blooms to take to our science teachers to see if they had ever encountered something similar. They were all as awed as I have been, especially when we looked more closely and saw that -- though only two fully developed buds are well-pronounced -- within the green thatch there are actually numerous other very small rosebuds. I am attaching several pictures I took that will hopefully show you what I am attempting to describe. I have read your other posts about roses within roses and seen the picture of the actual stem and bud growing out of the center. For those anomolies, you said that they could be caused by insect pollination. Could the same be true here? If so, how could there be multiple examples of the same oddity if it was dependent on insect pollination? Or is there another answer that would be apparent to someone who was more a rose expert than I? I look forward to your reply and appreciate your consideration. There is another possibility why this is happening, and that is that the rose is reverting to one of it's parents. Most roses are grafted, and created from two parents. So sometimes one of the parents is showing up in peculiar places. I have had this happen to one rose myself, and that rose became totally overtaken by one parent, and never looked the same. Click here to read or post comments. |
