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Growing from Seed

My teddy bear sunflowers are all different

natureinspiredM_ 6B NJ

8 years ago

I started my teddy bare sunflowers from seeds back in April. Now they are flowering . So far four out of 5 plants have bloomed but all have different kind of blooms. flower on only one plant resembles the picture I saw on the seed packet. Others are all so different, one in particular is very strange...it produced only seed head and not much of petals at all. Is it normal? Growing sunflowers for the first time. Here are some pictures:

Plant 1: This one have small patch in the center without petals

Plant 2: this one looks the way it's supposed to look

Plant 3: This is the strangest

Plant 4: Looks more like a gerbera daisy and I love it

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Comments (3)

xiangirl zone 4/5 Nebraska
8 years ago
They are beautiful. I can't say much about whether it's normal or not. My Teddy Bear Sunflowers didn't make it at all.
natureinspiredM_ 6B NJ thanked xiangirl zone 4/5 Nebraska
maxjohnson
8 years ago
They all look pretty to me, the third one look kind of strange, but I guess bees will appreciate it.
natureinspiredM_ 6B NJ thanked maxjohnson
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natureinspiredM_ 6B NJ
Original Author
8 years ago
Thanks for your comments garden friends. I think I have found an explanation to this strange behavior. A little googling confirmed my suspicion that just like marigolds the sunflowers too are composite flowers. Composite flowers are combination of many florets having different petal shapes. The florets are divided mainly in two groups, disk flowers (very tiny petals) in the center and ray flowers (much bigger petals) surrounding the center, which in combination give sunflower (or other composite flowers) it's final look. As they are all individual flowers, seeds collected from different zones will result in different shape of flowers (I remember reading this somewhere many years ago though in context of marigold).

I am assuming the teddy bear sunflower has very low number of disc flowers as compared to Ray flowers which is why they look so full and fuzzy. But in my seed packet atleas one viable seed of disc flower was there which I happened to germinate and grow. And that explains the strange looking flower on plant 3, it's comprised only of disk flowers. I'm still not sure seed from which part results in a daisy like flower as on plant 4. But atleast now I have explanation behind the different appearances :)

the seed companies should be more careful in collecting seeds from composite flowers I guess.

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