Animal Crossing: New Horizons flowers and hybrids guide (2024)

In this guide, we’ll explain how flowers work and the colors you can get from crossbreeding and pollinating with cosmoses, hyacinths, lilies, mums, pansies, roses, tulips, and windflowers to create some unique blue, pink, and even black flowers.

Every player has a native type of flower on their cliffs. These will always be available to purchase from your shop. After you build Nook’s Cranny, more flower breeds will be available to purchase. To grab a wide array of them quickly, you may have to travel to some friends’ islands or get lucky at a Nook Miles island.

Just like previous Animal Crossing games, you can crossbreed and create unique hybrid colors. The best way to do this is to plant your flowers in a checkerboard pattern, leaving every other space open for different plants to pollinate and hybrid flowers to grow.

Flowers need water (from rain or from you and your Watering Can) to grow and create a hybrid. Watered flowers sparkle.

Having friends from other islands water your flowers makes the flowers more likely to produce offspring, according to data mines from flower researcher Aeter. Aeter also has a spreadsheet of some of the most efficient ways to grow hybrid flowers, whereas our guide has been simplified for beginners.

You can pick flowers without completely uprooting the entire plant. Press Y while standing on a flower, and you’ll pick the flower and leave the stems to regrow. You can use these flowers in a variety of D.I.Y recipes.

Note that some flowers planted near each other will still create new flowers, even if they aren’t a hybrid color. These hybrid colors aren’t available for purchase, and they require crossbreeding to create. Some folks will find success in finding specific rare flowers from Mystery Island Tours, but below we’ve listed the easier way to breed the flowers from scratch.

There are multiple ways to get certain colors, but we’re listing the combinations with the highest probabilities to create rare colors, without using any flowers from Mystery Island Tours.

All of our combinations below start from seeds, which you can buy at Nook’s Cranny or from Leif’s kiosk. Using other flowers from different sources may skew your results.

Update (April 20): More information with easier ways to breed specific flowers has been added.

Update (April 27): Added information about increasing flower spawns by having friends visit from other islands and water your plants.

Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy.