Monday, May 5, 2008

Random plant event: weird Petunia behavior

At work recently, we have had a few petunia flowers do this:



It's only on the blue Tidal Wave plants, and only a few flowers. The flowers that are doing it are also on kind of sickly-looking, yellowish stems, which makes me think this is probably not a good thing for the plant. But it's pretty anyway, I think. I'd probably encourage it, if I knew how to make it happen. Anybody know what's going on here?


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

How unusual - but very attractive.

Priscilla George said...

The yellow foliage could be from iron or nitrogen deficiency. The color break in the flower could be a virus. I would suggest you do a search on petunia viruses and see if anything sounds like what you are experiencing. If it is a virus it will stay with the plant until it is dead and I would just suggest tossing it out.

mr_subjunctive said...

Yeah, probably a virus, it would seem. More flowers are breaking, though so far only on (I think) two individual plants; the foliage is getting back to a normal green, though. Ah well. I suppose it'll all get pitched soon enough.