We found these Kanzan flowers with white Petals at the center at its late stage in QE Park. Can we say they are their second-story flowers?
Maybe. Kuitert (Kuitert, Wybe, Japanese Flowering Cherries, Timber Press, Portland, Oregon, 1999, p124) describes two-story flowers as having all the flower parts - stamens, pistils, sepals, petals, starting out as a pink heart inside the petals of the main flower. I usually look for sepals, which is what he mentions in particular. This is described particularly in connection with chrysanthemum-type flowers, no mention of it with regard to 'Kanzan'. So if you see sepals behind the white petals, that are clearly not pistils that have been pushed aside by the petals, then that would seem to indicate that the lighter growth is a second-story flower, a very much abbreviated version of the first.
My wife, Janice Lin, just took back two withered Shirofugen flowers from Mountain View Cemetery. They seems to me two-story flowers with stamens, pistils, sepals, petals. They do have two beautiful green sepals under the the second flower.
Well, you know I'm not botanist. So I don't really know what we're looking at. But here is your seventh photo, cropped, with a circle around what I think looks like the stigma, the tip of a pistil. It is harder for me to tell in the other photos whether the style and stigma-looking bits belong to the possible sepal bits, but if they do, then those aren't sepals. In your fifth photo, though, the stamens and pistil do look like they are related to the white petals. Remember too that 'Shiro-fugen' send out those leafy bits in the centre that develop from pistils. Here is a posting that shows them clearly (or so I think - they're my photos). Identification: - Shirofugen- fluffy double whites fade to pink, bronze leaves turn green, late-season The little tree these are from is long gone. On 'Kiku-zakura', which are supposed to have two-story flowers, I think the photos in this posting show some green bits that are clearly not pistils (along with some where it's a bit ambiguous, at least to me). Identification: - Kiku-zakura - Pinky-white chrysanthemum, upright, very late
