Animal Crossing: New Horizons Hybrid Flowers Guide — How To Crossbreed Flowers

When you start a new island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you’ll find an assortment of flowers of one type on your cliffs. As you play, you’ll be able to buy more flower seeds and plant a variety of flower species to spruce up your island paradise. All of these flowers will be red, yellow, or white, but there are also quite a few other colors you can get if you learn to garden the Animal Crossing way.

These “hybrid” flowers include black, blue, purple, pink, and orange variations of the flowers you can plant normally. Hybrid flowers aren’t just pretty–they can sometimes attract rare bugs you couldn’t get otherwise and can also be used as crafting ingredients, so it’s a good idea to have at least a few on your island.

Types Of Flowers

Like with your native island fruit, there will be one type of flower that grows on your cliffs when you start the game; keep in mind that you’ll need a ladder to scale the cliffs. You can buy other varieties of flowers (in seed form) from Tommy in Resident Services or at Nook’s Cranny when it opens. The flower varieties include:

• Lily
• Tulip
• Rose
• Pansy
• Cosmos
• Windflower
• Hyacinth
• Mum

While the Nook’s Cranny stock rotates each day, there will be some kinds of flowers they’ll never sell, so you’ll have to buy those from friends’ shops. For example, your shop might sell lilies, tulips, pansies, windflowers, and hyacinths, but never roses, cosmos, or mums, so you’d have to find a friend whose shop does sell one of those in order to plant them on your island.

Each of these flowers comes in red, white, and yellow varieties aside from windflowers, which come in red, white, and orange initially. All other colors aren’t sold at Nook’s Cranny and are considered rare.

How To Grow Hybrid Flowers

The main way to grow hybrid flowers is by crossbreeding two others. Flowers can crossbreed if they’re the same species of flower, they’re planted next to each other (either directly or diagonally), and they’ve been watered with any kind of watering can or by rain. If these conditions are met, a new flower has a chance of sprouting on nearby empty spaces the next day.

To maximize your chances of producing a new flower, try planting your flowers in a crosshatch pattern so that the flowers are touching diagonally but not directly side-to-side. This will leave enough room between flowers for new ones to spawn. If you’re having trouble planting them in a pattern, try digging holes where you want them to go and then planting the flowers; your character will prioritize planting them in nearby holes first before planting them on flat ground. This should help you better control the spacing of your flowers so you don’t have to dig them up and replant them a bunch.

Hybrid flowers generally follow standard color-mixing rules, but there are some strange exceptions, including colors that you can only get through a chain of flower-breeding. Note that you won’t always get a rare color from crossbreeding, so read on for which combinations of flowers can produce hybrid flowers. We’ll continue to update this list as we confirm more colors and combinations.

Hybrid Flower Combinations

Lily

• Pink = Red + White
• Orange = Red + Yellow
• Black = Red + Red

Tulip

• Pink = Red + White
• Orange = Red + Yellow
• Black = Red + Red
• Purple = Orange + Orange

Rose

• Pink = Red + White
• Orange = Red + Yellow
• Black = Red + Red
• Purple = White + White
• Blue
• Gold

Pansy

• Orange = Red + Yellow
• Blue = White + White

Cosmos

• Pink = Red + White
• Orange = Red + Yellow
• Black

Windflower

Hyacinth

• Pink = Red + White
• Purple
• Blue = White + White

Mum

Other Ways To Get Hybrid Flowers

While you mostly have to grow hybrid flowers yourself, if you’re lucky, you may find rare flowers while on a deserted island Mystery Tour. In order to take some home with you, you’ll need a shovel; dig up the flowers and you’ll be able to replant them on your own island. This also goes for flowers on your Best Friends’ islands if you ask nicely!

Unlike in previous Animal Crossing games, you can pick flowers without losing the whole plant. If you need hybrid flowers for a DIY recipe or just decoration, simply pick them using Y and they’ll grow back within a few days.