Does anyone know how a flowering shrub can have all white flowers and only one peach flower with a different center piece.

Hi Pandora- despite my username I probably won’t be able to help you but I just wanted to say you could try uploading the photo at http://imgur.com/ and posting a link to it here :)

Thanks, let me see if this works. Please let me know. http://imgur.com/5d9qS.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

Yeah, it worked! They actually look like camellias to me. What do you think?

They come close and probably have some relation but the leaves of the shrub are shorter and rounder instead of long and narrow at the tip. I’m beginning to think it must’ve been some hybrid created. I still don’t get how it had that one peach flower so different from the others in the middle of all those white ones. the color wasn’t he only off thing. the flower petals was thicker like a rose where the white ones were really soft and fragile.

The most likely answer is that they were probably spliced together. Splicing is the process by which the limb of a plant is grafted into a notch cut in another plant (or ‘host’ plant). Many plants have been artificially created by grafting – I remember seeing a fruit tree that would bear every different kind of popular citrus fruit – ie, limes, lemons, oranges, and grape fruits, all from the ‘same’ plant. Many plants will take very well to splicing, and bushes/trees especially due to their more rigid woody limb structure.

@wyrenyth If this was a public garden or someones personal garden I could see that being the case but it was just some flowering bushes planted in an apartment setting. All of the other bushes had white flowers except this one bush with this one solitary flower. I was wondering if it was possibly the male or female bloom of this bush and that is why it was so different. Or maybe it was a hybrid and this one flower accidently came out of it.

@Pandora I doubt it. Generally, with hybrids, the entire plant displays the hybrid characteristics. (See Mendel’s work with peas here.) Grafted plants can be purchased at most nurseries, and are not necessarily the work of gardening enthusiasts.

It would also depend on the type of bush it is. Some species of plants will only display one gender or the other, while others will display characteristics of both, or have flowers which can feasibly self pollinate. If the bush is truly monoecious, one would expect for more of the opposite sex flowers to be displayed on all bushes as opposed to just the one.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the one flower is simply a genetic fluke, a chance happenstance of miscopied DNA that may or may not be reproduced. You couldn’t be sure without close examination of the flower to determine the reproduction components it comprises, or whether it would breed true without letting it seed (assuming it is female), or taking a seed pollinated by that flower’s stamens (assuming it is male) and growing them to maturity to see what color of flowers bloomed.