Thanks for the encouragement! I’m indeed using morphs to grow plants, bloom flowers and pop leaves but this is done as part of a custom generic flora component which acts like a state machine.
i.e. each flora goes through a number of states which can specify morph changes, transform changes (for procedural animations to scale/rotation) and material instance transformations (eg: wind weight is animated from an initial value for a sapling to a full value for grown plants or SSS color for a flower pod to blooming flower ).
The idea is that if I quickly need to assemble a new species of plant I just need to prepare the artwork per usual (with optional morphs) and then setup a ‘flora masterplan’ which is basically a tree representation of a flora and all its children, describing the entire lifecycle of a plant. One nifty feature is a ‘Trigger of life’ pulse that each parent flora can send to its child flora telling it that it to wake up from dormancy meaning you can configure exactly when a new leaf shoots out from a parent stalk or during which stage of a plant’s life the flower bud is supposed to be born.