I hope I'm in the correct forum. This plant's flower colour used to be a rich pink. Now white. Can someone explain it to me?
Yarrow Achillea millefolium. White is the normal colour for the species in the wild, but there are also some pink-flowered cultivars. I'd guess you had one of those, and it died while seedlings from it grew with normal white flowers.
The plant has never died. It has always been pink and this year the flowers are white. ?? Here is a photo of the original plant. The plant in the first photo was taken from it. There are pink and white flowers on the original plant this year. A pink flower is just opening up on the right amongst the white flowers and of course pink on the left. Anyone?
The white can be accounted for by the pink giving off seedling(s) that grew up to make a clump of more than one plant with the pink, or (more likely judging from how the clump looks) by the pink selection reverting back to the typical white plant. This is not rare among garden selections, conspicuous examples are variegated shrubs making green-leaved branches and vigorous growths bursting out of the sides of dwarf or slow-growing conifer cultivars. The latter phenomonon is often seen with frequently planted dwarf Alberta spruce.
