Your pictures look like "common Ginger," AKA "true ginger" or "Canton ginger", scientific name "Zingiber officinale." It's the ginger you get as fresh ginger root at the grocery store.

That's what I grow. I grow all my ginger plants in containers, so everything I have any given year is "first year growth." I harvest everything from my containers and I save some "seed rhizomes" from the first plant or two that die back and go dormant every year. My "first year" ginger plants nearly always bloom, and blooms range in color from white to orange to deep red to purple.

From my own experience, I think the color of the blooms has more to do with chemistry than genetics. Plants grown in identical growing mix and fertilized with identical fertilizer tend to have the same coloration to the blooms. Of course, I don't always use the same growing mix for all my plants, so I get some variety in the blooms on mine.

Thanks Common Cents. I am just happy the blooms came out better than I expected! It's supposed to get down to 39F this weekend so I suppose the ginger will start dying back and I can thin about cutting it back and harvesting. I can't wait to see how much there is underground.

That's beautiful. It would have surprised me too, because I also read that it takes two years for ginger to flower.