Here's How to Grow All Animal Crossing Flowers (2024)

• A popular chart shows how to plant flowers to get hybrids in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
• The game's gardening combines real flower pollinating ideas with a watering mechanic.
  
• Hybrid plants in nature are harder to predict and can express a variety of good and bad traits.

Nintendo’s Animal Crossing installment, New Horizons, has lit the internet on fire and shattered sales records on the Switch console, which in turn has virtually gone missing from stores since the beginning of social distancing in March.

And while much of the game is just bopping around a pretend island and catching fish, there’s one mechanic in New Horizons that's at least loosely based on reality: cross-pollinating flowers to make hybrids.

So how does this line up with the realities of breeding flowers?

This popular chart, courtesy of Australian graphic designer Khairul Hamdan, breaks down all the game's flower varieties into cross-breeding grids:

The way these flowers are programmed certainly doesn’t bear much resemblance to real life. But in a strange way, trying to guess at outcomes and understand hidden hybrid genes has added shades of scientific realism.

Let’s use what we know to examine how flower breeding in the game maps to reality. Polygon has a mathematical breakdown of which flowers “add up” to which other flowers. To get your flowers in the mood for love, you have to water them, have the right two colors next to each other, and leave an empty square where a third flower can sprout.

In Hamdan’s chart, he’s arranged the number of flowers you need to end up with the full selection. (Note: Hamdan tells Popular Mechanics the information in his chart isn’t totally complete due to the constantly evolving nature of New Horizons, but he is making frequent updates with new facts he’s learned from outlets like Polygon and various gamers' YouTube channels.)

Is crossing real flowers as easy as planting them together and crossing your fingers? Well, almost. With plants, there are strict definitions for terms like hybrid and heirloom. People can isolate plants with traits they want to breed in and then cross-pollinate those plants while excluding others.

The mechanic in Animal Crossing Pocket Camp gets closer to reality, surprisingly enough. In that game, you pick flowers to tap together directly. This results in one of several outcomes, with the possibility that your attempt fails. In New Horizons, the breeding is passive, but the outcome is almost guaranteed. The only complication is if you plant more than just the two desired flowers next to each other, you could get more than one combination.

Since plants have many more genes than just color, what results from one cross-pollinated field of the same variety is a scattershot of different traits and levels of expression of those traits. Hybrids can be tougher and more vital than their precedents, with mutations or hidden qualities. Animal Crossing picks up this idea with new colors that result from two white flowers or two “hybrid” red flowers, for example.

The blue hyacinth I saw on gaming writer Rebekah Valentine's island came from two white hyacinths, but a rare blue rose must come from two invisibly hybrid red roses. And these combinations also suggest the game is playing with the idea of recessive genes.

Many real hybrids are sterile, meaning they either don’t produce seeds, or those seeds aren’t viable. (One literal version of this is in fruits like clementines, whose seedless version must be cross pollinated by another clementine tree.) But annual and perennial flowers like lilies, roses, and tulips—the stars of Animal Crossing—have everything they need to pollinate themselves, and you can collect and store their seeds.

Gardener Sally Roth wrote in Fine Gardening that she began collecting and saving seeds after losing a favorite flower she could not replace. Saving seeds reduced cost and increased her efficacy. “Instead of waiting half a lifetime to have an ocean of blue scillas under my trees, I accomplished it in five years by collecting seed and nurturing the tiny plants that sprouted, planting them one by one in a gradually outward-spreading area,” Roth wrote.

Sound familiar? That’s what almost everyone is busy doing in New Horizons to make sure their flowers are thriving and diverse: digging up seedlings and moving them to their own space, where they can thrive and propagate. And it’s what Hamdan had in mind as he turned source material online into spreadsheets at first and then a user-friendly graphic.

“I designed the flower chart to get every hybrid flower using the minimum amount of space and starting flowers,” says Hamdan. “It was really interesting to see the underlying game mechanics and how they represented what happens in real life.”

By making the chart graphically interesting, colorful, and useful even for people with color blindness, Hamdan hopes he’s made planting and monitoring flowers a little easier.

“I am quite happy with how it all turned out, even if it has been a lot of work to redesign and update the chart,” he says. “I am just glad that people are enjoying and using it!”