I'm pondering something. Which species of flowers have the widest color ranges available within a single species?

For example, a true blue, true red, and true yellow possibly in addition to white and/or black?

I can think of a couple but I want to know if there anyone else can think of others. It's just something I'm thinking about.

Pansies come to mind - blue, purple, red, orange, yellow, white. No green that I'm aware of (?) and I don't think there are any truly black flowers (? could be wrong), but these come close with the very dark purples.

Echinacea has no Black or Blue but many shades of red , orange, yellows, golds, pinks, whites,greens,purples,maroon also mixed colors.
My guess would be that Iris have the most different colors.

Bonehead said:Pansies come to mind - blue, purple, red, orange, yellow, white. No green that I'm aware of (?) and I don't think there are any truly black flowers (? could be wrong), but these come close with the very dark purples.

Pansies were the ones I thought of, too.They have blue, red, yellow, white, and near-black. The only color I've never seen is green.

Iris is another good one, Bob. They're like pansies - red, orange, yellow, blue, purple, white, black(ish). Even some unattractive (to me) grayish ones. No real green that I could find - although some of the yellow ones are greenish or have some green accents.

Zinnias have a true green (and red, yellow, and white) but no true blue.

NJBob said:Echinacea has no Black or Blue but many shades of red , orange, yellows, golds, pinks, whites,greens,purples,maroon also mixed colors.

In terms of color theory echinacea are limited in color because the red/pink/purple/orange/maroon you mention are all considered reds.

It seems blue and green are the difficult colors.

Yeah. The bluest flower I've ever grown is Lathyrus sativus var azureus. It is purer blue than morning glories or bachelor's buttons.

Green flowers should really be more common considering that evolutionarily all flowers are just modified leaves.

Tulips

Tulips are limited in the same way as Echinacea. They have a myriad of beautiful colors but the vast majority of them are on the red end of the spectrum. Green is represented, but blue is not at all.

Bonehead said:Iris is another good one, Bob. They're like pansies - red, orange, yellow, blue, purple, white, black(ish). Even some unattractive (to me) grayish ones. No real green that I could find - although some of the yellow ones are greenish or have some green accents.

What are the variety names of the gray flowers? I'm interested to see but when I Google "gray iris" I get pictures of eyeballs...

From what I remember of my horticulture classes in college, we were taught that there isn't any plant genus that has the "full color spectrum" of blooms.
One color is always absent.
It seems to me that daylilies would come closest, given that there are something like 80,000 cultivars (+-) and that they are easily cross-bred.

Nope, daylilies have the exact same color limits mentioned for echinacea and tulips.

If you have 50,000 red hues of Flower A and only 2 varieties of Flower B, but one of those is red and one is blue, the second example has a wider variation by definition even though it has fewer hues.

I think everyone except Deb misunderstood the question (or uses a different understanding of color theory). lol

Jai, open our iris database and do a search by characteristic simply choosing 'gray' as the primary color. Mostly what comes up are very light purples and blues - not true grays but some are pretty close.

Thank you. Those are...different looking.

Some varieties of Shirley poppies (especially Mother of Pearl) can have blooms which are an even steel grey. Usually though the gray is just an undertone against some shade of red.

They would probably have to make the color differently than iris do because Shirley poppies have nothing on the blue end of the color spectrum (unlike iris).

Out of curiosity, I also searched our iris databank for green, but nothing really popped out at me as green; lots of yellows that leaned toward chartreuse, and lots with some green accents. I suppose that could count (?) as green coloration.

I still haven't mastered the art of looking through the database. I tend to go down the rabbit hole and just keep looking at pretty things over and over.

The genus Primula has a very wide color range, including green, blue & black, but I don't think there is a particular Primula species (non-hybrid) with an extraordinary color range.

Good call, Janine - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white - all covered with primroses.