There's a few ways that colors are inherited.

Some are your basic single gene, dominant recessive inheritance. Lets say that Yellow is dominant, white is recessive. The flower can ger a Y from mom and a Y from dad and be a YY and look yellow. Or it could get w from mom and w from dad and be white. Or it could get one of each, be Yw, look yellow, but be able to throw a few white baby seedlings.

You also have some things like four o'clocks where the genetics control the color in a way that gives blends. A white crossed with a red gives a pink.

Then you can get ones where the color is actually caused by more than one gene. You might see blue, but two different genes are doing something that gives the overall look of a blue.

There's a book called "Breed your own vegetable varieties" that covers all of the complicated details, but also has a bunch of more straightforward stuff in it that can guide you in intentionally breeding your own veggies or flowers to get characteristics like tallness, hardiness, color and the like. Some of the book is pretty heavy reading, but then she shows you how simple it can also be to make something all your own.

When you winter sow, just the simple act of planting seeds that way and then selecting the hardiest of the seedlings will actually steer you toward your own strains of seed that are best suited to your growing region.

Same idea with my four o'clocks. I've got one plant that is a rich true red. Never had one like that before. When I save four o clock seeds this year, hers will be kept apart in their own seperate baggie and given their own part of the garden next year so I can try to get more of that unusual red.

I'll add a link for the book. You might like to see if your library has it. I found it inspiring when I read the part about how the sugar snap pea was one guy's backyard cross. The plant was made in only about two growing seasons (of course it took more than that to build a big seed supply and sell it to seed catalogs.) Pretty amazing what you can do in your own back yard with plant genetics.

Lynda

Here is a link that might be useful: great plant breeding book

Thanks Lynda I knew there had to be an explanation for it. I love the new color that I got with my butterfly bush but it's really growing in a bad place, it's interfering with my pepper plants, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. I've got a cutting off it growing already which I'll probably plant on my neighbors side but I still hate to cut down such a pretty plant. I appreciate the link and will defiantly be looking into that book.

Thank you,
Strouper2

According to folklore Mendel's genetic study of the color of flowers is how our modern knowledge of genetics got started.

There are some color coded charts at the link below (They appear to be by some educational institution but at first blush I don't see which one.). The studies on flowers start about a third way down the page.

Here is a link that might be useful: Mendel's genetics.

Interesting.
Jill

and here i thought it was all the bees at work!! LOL i sooo want to get some of them butterfly bushes!! mine did not winter sow. but i always did wonder about the coloring and found it very intriguing!!! LOL :')) ~Medo

Mendel's genetic studies on peas give a great description of single gene, dominant recessive inheritance. That's like the Yw example I gave above.

The plant breeding book goes into non-Mendel inheritance as well, as well as talking about which plants are natural inbreeders or outbreeders.

One of the most interesting things in the book was how tallness is for the most part single gene, Mendel inheritance with tall being dominant and short being the recessive. So TT plants are tall, as are Tt and tT. Only the tt babies carry the genetic pattern for shortness.

Of course where you plant them and how you water them matters as well, but we see some very interessting Mendel tall stuff going on here on our land.

We've got a lot of wild achelia. It's normally about 3 feet tall with the blooms carried at the end of a long flower stalk.

Since we got the goats and cow, we now have two very different achelia populations here. Outside the fence we have normal tall achelia. Inside the fence, we only got weird little short achelias that bloom on three inch flower stalks! It seems that the goats and cow have been eating the tall ones and the achelia population has been selectively culled so that only the short guys have a fighting chance of being able to bloom, set seed, and scatter their seed to make the next generation of seedlings.

The book goes into some other stuff, like how single gene traits let big changes happen quickly (like in our acheilia) but that there's usually other genes factoring in as well so that even in longstanding populations of short plants there is still some genetic tallness tucked away in their genes. So take away the goats for a few years, let everything grow tall, and those short achelia will find a way to have some tall kids and fight to continue to produce babies with the best chance of reproducing in the new "tall" environment.

And then you also have some stuff that follows Mendel by the book and everything can be explained with xx xy yx and yy type models. (Incidentally, Four O'clocks seem to be the main plant used for teaching students about non-mendel color inheritance.)

Lynda

Well before this I wasn't thinking of the X&Y factor I was just thinking that red flowers give you red seeds. It's been a long time since I've taken any science classes and even then I don't think that we covered the birds and the bees of flowers very well. LOL This is way too interesting & I'd like to thank you all for giving me another plant item to do my homework on, as if I didn't have enough already.

medontdo I'd send you some seeds but I've never tried to collect them before because they are so small and also for some reason I've been very lucky at having my BB's do all the birds and bees work themselves. I started out with 2 bushes and I now have 4 plus another one growing in a separate pot. I was having some trouble with one of my plants falling apart at the beginning of the month so I posted a question on the BF forum and someone offered a way to reproduce the plants off of cuttings so if you have enough of a plant left you might want to check this out:
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/butterfly/msg0615082614921.html?10

Strouper