Mums changing their colors
Question from Supriya:
I had bought red coloured mums, but the new buds which are blooming are yellow in color instead of red. Can you please let me know, what went wrong. I am from India (Mumbai)
Answer from Pat:
You did nothing wrong. The grower made a mistake and mis-marked the plants. Many growers tell me they have problems that arise from some of their best workers not being able to read English. Seed packages sometimes end up containing the wrong color of plant or the wrong species altogether. In your case the plants were undoubtedly grown from cuttings but a batch of yellow cuttings must have been accidentally marked red. If you purchased your plants from a nursery and the label is still on them, the nursery might possibly exchange them for red.
The Plant was not marked red… it had red coloured flowers when i bought it.
There are several possible reasons why your mums changed color. One is because the original color might be a variety produced by artificial means, such as radiation, by a plant developer. It is strange, but chrysanthemum colors are sometimes unstable because they have been forced under lights and also because the colors were artificially produced. For example a grower might have poured a substance such as red dye around the roots and dyed the flowers red for the holidays. When the red gets washed away as the plant is watered the flower goes back to yellow or white again. Anyway, don’t worry about it. The reason is not important. Many people have experienced cases where chrysanthemums change color. You are not the only person that has noticed this. When chrysanthemums are grown in a flower bed, for example, sometimes one variety is dominant and takes over. When planted in a pot, two varieties sometimes accidentally get mixed into the same pot. There may be 3 to 5 cuttings put into a pot in the beginning and I have often seen ones where accidentally they were mixed. They either bloom at the same time or one blooms first and then the other. The point is that you didn’t do anything wrong. Many times people have chrysanthemums and other flowers also that change color. The chrysanthemums you purchased in a pot are not the old garden varieties. They were developed as pot plants to be fooled by lights so they think it is fall, which is the natural time for chrysanthemums to bloom. By changing the number of daylight hours they grow in, growers can be made to bloom at any time of year and thus they can be used the same as cut flowers. Buy them, enjoy them for about six weeks and then throw them out. It is no big deal.
I purchased mums, pretty orange/rust color, they looked so nice, but this year the same plants are yellow/white. I was surprised, will see if it happens next fall.
It is possible that some cuttings used in the pots you purchased last year were the yellow/white variety but didn’t bloom last year and this year they are blooming.
I planted a yellow mum in a flower bed, about 12-13 years ago, it got larger every year! this year I did a lot of digging and adding more soil to the area.
When it bloomed I was very surprised after this long to see that 1/2 of it was yellow and the other 1/2 was white.
Plants changing color is a common event with hybrid plants. Sometimes some roots in the original pot were of a white variety and did not grow until this year and because the white variety was perhaps more vigorous than the yellow, they took over. Sometimes, also, this change of color is caused by the genetics of the plant, which is most likely what explains your experience, since so many turned white. A plant that has white in its genetic heritage may “sport” buds that are white, especially if the white variety was a stronger grower than the yellow variety. Sometimes the yellow variety was started as a sport on another variety and my switch back again to what it came from. This happens with certain hybrid camellias, where sometimes a whole branch will sport another variety or maybe just a few blossoms.