I am attempting to make a flower grow. I was curious if there was some way to do the animation in blender, rather then render frame for frame and use flash to put it into time. I have the complete flower modelled, and I was going to move points and scale objects to grow backwards from the complete model, but this is extremely time consuming. I have searched tutorials, and as of now, it seems as though my only options are either shape keys, or applying armatures. I think too detailed for armatures, and you cannot add or erase any vertices using shape keys. Any suggestions or tutorials out there???
Gabio said that you can achieve growing effect this with a bone scaling. I didn’t try it yet, but I trust him.
Well i never looked wheter there is a morph-tool in blender. This might be qwl.
My idea were shapekeys too, first.
If you can not delete vertices with shapekeys, then perhaps you can try to moddel the latest frame (as you did), and then scale the petals very small, move some vertices that you get a burgeon and so on. Everything that is not needed is scaled in the interior 
Sounds a bit newbish but it could work