The orange cosmos flower - pretty, isn't it?

We’ve had yellow cosmos flowers gracing our garden for about a year now, and I love those flowers – the combination of the shape and colour just perk up my day! Because of that, I decided to get some orange cosmos seeds and grow them, too.

I don’t know why, but I initially had quite a bit of trouble growing these plants to their full potential. They seemed less vigorous than their yellow counterparts, flowering only once, then drying off.

Now, however, I have a plant that is growing like the yellow cosmos plants – it bloomed once, then started budding more and more and more! Finally, I have a decent orange cosmos plant growing, and it warms my heart to see it in bloom.

Several orange cosmos flowers in various stages of bloom

And the profile view:

Side profile of the cosmos flower. Do I see potential seeds?

An interesting thing about the flowers as they age is that you’ll see red streaks show along the petals even as the rest of the surface of th petals fade in colour. You can see it in the photo above.

So why did this cosmos plant grow better than the earlier ones I grew? Could it be because it’s less rainy now? Or was the seed that this plant grew from more robust than the earlier ones? I don’t know, but I’ll try to keep growing these to find out!

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