'Akebono' flowers are pretty much all on the ground now in the West End of Vancouver, and that's the case for this little grove at the edge of Stanley Park. The trees are older than I remember - here is the first posting, from 2010: https://forums.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/threads/west-end-stanley-park.35159/page-6#post-248323 i was surprised to see one tree with a lot of flowers looking pretty good, and not only that, they're large, to 5cm. With lots of petals, not just a few little petaloids, but 13 full petals on one I counted. And not only that, they have zillions of sepals, more than five extra. And extra stamens too. Some of the flowers with extra sepals have two calyces, but not all of them. Another I counted that was in the same corymb as the 13-petal flower had only one calyx with six petals plus one that wasn't expanded. Is this just an 'Akebono' with a lot of fasciation going on, or is it something else, maybe some other P. yedoensis cultivar? I'd have wondered about it being yedoensis since I was seeing no hairs in my photos (finally found two with some hairs), but did see quite a few hairs with my loupe. Here is the grove, with the tree at issue featured, and the tree itself. In previous years, I noticed that "some" of the trees seemed to lag behind the others. I don't think I examined them to see if there were other differences. Here are flowers from the front. Except for one zoomed photo, these are from all over the tree, not just one location on it. Here are the sepals, and a twin calyx. Not all the flowers were unusual for 'Akebono'. Maybe half were normal, or a little on the large side but with just five petals and five sepals. But in any group of flowers, I could find some of the odd ones. An attempt to show some hairs. These are mostly falling as single petals, with just the odd whole flower.
I'm fascinated by the fasciation, but it can't be 'Akebono'. I mean, if this is a mutation, it should be given a different name. Maybe this could be Wendy's new cultivar. :)
